Amazon Buys 1,200-Acre Data Hub at Nuke Plant in Pennsylvania

Data centers that support GenAI training require a voracious amount of available electric power, but that won’t be an issue with 1,200-acre data hub acquired this month in Pennsylvania by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The Cumulus data center campus in Berwick, PA is directly connected to 2.5-gigawatt Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, one of the nation’s largest nuclear power plants.

Talen Energy, which owns the plant, has agreed to sell its Cumulus Data subsidiary to AWS for $650M, according to a report in Data Center Dynamics.

Cumulus completed its first hyperscale data center, a 48MW, 300K SF facility, at the Luzerne County site last year. The company planned to scale up the site to 960 MW.

AWS plans to build out the campus to its full capacity in coming years. The cloud computing giant has a 10-year agreement with Talen to provide energy to the site, with the minimum power usage increasing in 120 MW increments.

The deal has options that allow AWS to extend it by up to 20 years; Amazon also can cap its total power commitments at 480 MW. The package does not include a crypto mining facility operating on the site, the report said.

AWS is not the only data center player planning to deploy nuclear-powered data processing in Pennsylvania.

Last fall, Standard Power, a data center operator that provides colocation for AI training and blockchain mining, announced plans to deploy up to two dozen small modular reactors (SMR) to power data center campuses in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The two data campuses will use reactors built by ENTRA1, an energy development and production company, which will use SMR technology from NuScale Power Corp., which last year became the first company to have an SMR design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Up to 24 modular reactors will be deployed at the two data center hubs, capable of generating nearly 2 gigawatts of power. Similar in scale to the nuclear reactors that are used by the US Navy to power subs and aircraft carriers, each of the pressurized water SMR units can generate 77 megawatts of electricity.

In 2022, Portland, OR-based NuScale formed an exclusive global partnership with ENTRA1 Energy to commercialize the SMR technology, granting ENTA1 the rights to develop, manage, own and operate energy production plants powered by the small reactors.

Standard Power provides Infrastructure as a Service to advanced data processing operations. Maxim Serezhin, Standard Power’s CEO, said in a statement that modular reactors are poised to address a “large gap” in power generation as demand grows for power-hungry data centers to support the needs of AI companies training bots.

“We see a lot of legacy baseload grid capacity going offline with a lack of new sustainable baseload generation options on the market especially as power demand for artificial intelligence (AI)-computing and data centers is growing,” Serezhin said.

In February 2023, Richmond, VA-based Dominion Energy-the primary supplier of electricity for the largest North American data center hub in Northern Virginia-and NE Edge announced plans to build a 1.5M SF data center campus adjacent to Dominion’s nuclear power plant in Waterford, Connecticut.

The companies filed plans in Waterford to build the campus, consisting of two hyperscale data centers, next to the Millstone Nuclear Power Station, a 57-year-old facility owned by Dominion, according to a report in the Connecticut Examiner.

The partners are planning two, two-story data centers on a 25-acre site adjacent to the power plant, the first encompassing 1.14M SF and the second totaling 428K SF, with delivery expected by mid-2025.

The data center campus will draw power directly from the Millstone plant in what is known as a “behind the meter” agreement with Dominion. Behind the meter arrangements generally have lower rates because no transmission is involved in servicing the facility.