The Susquehanna Steam Electric Station in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, is one of the most powerful nuclear plants in the country. Its two boiling-water reactors generate enough electricity to supply more than two million homes. As of mid-2026, virtually all of that output now belongs to a single customer: Amazon Web Services.
Talen Energy, which owns and operates Susquehanna, has committed the plant’s full generating capacity to power Amazon’s AI data centers under a deal spanning 17 years. The arrangement builds on an earlier power purchase agreement that covered up to 960 megawatts, roughly half the plant’s output. The expanded contract locks in both reactors, tying what amounts to roughly 2.5 gigawatts of net generating capacity to one corporate buyer’s computing workloads for nearly two decades.
For the 65 million people who depend on the PJM Interconnection grid stretching across 13 states and the District of Columbia, the implications are significant: one of the region’s largest sources of always-on, carbon-free electricity is being redirected away from the shared wholesale market and dedicated to a private tech operation, though the precise mechanism governing how power flows under the restructured deal differs from the original co-location proposal that federal regulators rejected.
How the deal took shape
The commercial relationship between Talen and Amazon traces back to the sale of Cumulus Data assets to AWS. That transaction included a data center campus physically adjacent to the Susquehanna plant, paired with the initial 960 MW power purchase agreement, according to Talen Energy corporate filings.
But the original structure ran into a wall. In November 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected the proposed co-location arrangement, ruling that it would allow Amazon’s data centers to bypass wholesale market rules and shift costs onto other ratepayers in the PJM system. FERC’s order, issued under Docket No. ER24-2726, forced both companies to restructure how power would flow from the plant to Amazon’s facilities.
The expanded deal that emerged scales the commitment to cover both reactors and extends the contract to 17 years, as first reported by Reuters. The precise terms, including pricing, termination clauses, and how the arrangement addresses FERC’s earlier objections about bypassing wholesale market rules, have appeared only in corporate announcements and industry reporting, not in public regulatory filings. It is not clear from available disclosures whether the restructured agreement constitutes a full withdrawal of Susquehanna’s output from the PJM wholesale market or whether it operates under a different commercial mechanism designed to satisfy FERC’s concerns.
On the technical side, both Susquehanna units have received U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval for measurement uncertainty recapture power uprates, a process that allows operators to extract additional megawatts from existing reactor hardware without major physical modifications. The NRC lists Unit 1 with its licensed thermal power rating on file. Those uprates give Talen the regulatory basis to offer a higher combined output to Amazon.
The gaps in the public record
Despite the deal’s scale, several critical details have not surfaced in regulatory filings as of June 2026.
No FERC or PJM filing has confirmed the full reservation at the expanded capacity level or analyzed its effect on regional grid reliability. The NRC’s jurisdiction covers reactor safety, not how a plant owner allocates commercial output. That regulatory gap means the grid-impact question falls to PJM and FERC, and neither has published a formal review of the restructured arrangement.
The construction timeline is also unclear from available sources. Hyperscale data centers capable of absorbing this much power take years to permit and build. Amazon has not disclosed whether its build-out schedule aligns with Talen’s uprated output. If the data centers come online in phases, Talen could sell surplus power on the open market during interim periods, but neither company has confirmed that plan.
Then there is pricing. Nuclear power purchase agreements of this duration typically involve fixed or escalating rate structures that give the buyer cost certainty and the seller revenue stability. The specific dollars-per-megawatt-hour terms have not appeared in any public filing. Without that figure, it is impossible to know whether Amazon secured a discount relative to wholesale market rates or is paying a premium for guaranteed carbon-free supply.
Why grid planners are watching closely
The Eastern grid is already under pressure. Coal plant retirements have accelerated across PJM territory. Summer peak demand has been climbing. And the interconnection queue for new data centers, concentrated in Virginia, Ohio, and now Pennsylvania, has ballooned to the point where PJM has warned of potential capacity shortfalls in coming years.
If the restructured deal does pull Susquehanna’s output away from the wholesale market, the consequences for the broader grid could be substantial. Nuclear stations are the backbone of PJM’s baseload generation: they run around the clock, regardless of weather, and they do not emit carbon. When one of those plants stops selling into the common pool, every other generator and every ratepayer in the system absorbs the consequences, whether through higher capacity auction prices, increased reliance on natural gas, or tighter reserve margins during heat waves.
PJM conducts reliability assessments when large loads connect or when generation resources change their market participation, but no public study has modeled the specific impact of a potential Susquehanna exit from the wholesale market. That gap stands out given the deal’s size and the grid stress already building across the region.
A pattern spreading across the nuclear industry
Amazon’s arrangement with Talen is not happening in isolation. It fits a pattern that has been accelerating across the nuclear sector. Constellation Energy has been working to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania under a long-term agreement with Microsoft, though that project has faced its own PJM and regulatory scrutiny. Google has signed agreements with small modular reactor developers to secure future nuclear capacity for its data centers.
The common thread is a shift in how the largest tech companies think about electricity. They are moving away from renewable energy credits and virtual power purchase agreements, instruments that leave electrons flowing through the shared grid, and toward physical, dedicated power supplies they control directly. The appeal is obvious: AI training runs and cloud computing operations demand uninterrupted power at massive scale, and nuclear is the only carbon-free source that can deliver both around the clock.
But each of these deals removes firm generation capacity from the shared grid and dedicates it to a single corporate load. The cumulative effect, as more plants get claimed, is a question that regulators, grid operators, and the public are only beginning to confront. The Susquehanna deal, by virtue of its sheer size and duration, has made that question impossible to ignore.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
