Amazon Pays $650M For Nuclear-Powered Data Center Campus

Amazon Web Services has acquired Talen Energy’s Cumulus data center campus in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, a facility powered entirely by an adjacent nuclear power station.

Talen Energy announced Monday morning it is selling its 960-megawatt Cumulus campus to what the firm described in a press release as a "major cloud service provider," which was revealed in a subsequent investor presentation to be Amazon.

The 1,200-acre campus is connected directly to Talen’s 2.5-gigawatt Susquehanna Steam Electric Station in Berwick, Pennsylvania, one of the largest nuclear power plants in the country. 

The $650M deal will see Amazon acquire both the site and the assets of Cumulus Data, the Talen subsidiary behind the campus’s initial development. Talen is expected to receive $350M at close, with the remaining $300M paid out following development milestones expected later this year. 

Talen launched Cumulus Data in 2020 to develop hyperscale data center campuses powered by the parent company’s nuclear assets. Cumulus broke ground in 2021 on its Pennsylvania campus about 20 miles southwest of Wilkes-Barre.

The first hyperscale data center on the site, a 48 MW, 300K SF facility, was completed last year. The property also hosts a crypto mining data center that is not part of the deal with Amazon, Data Center Dynamics reported.  

According to Talen, AWS intends to continue building out the site to its full 960 MW potential. The energy provider has a 10-year agreement with AWS to provide energy to the site, with the tech giant's minimum power usage increasing in 120 MW increments over the coming years. AWS has options that allow it to extend the contract by as many as 20 years, as well as cap its total power commitments at 480 MW. 

AWS’ acquisition follows a growing trend of major tech companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft building massive data center campuses in rural locations or smaller markets that they would never have considered just 18 months ago. Within the past year, AWS has launched data center development efforts in rural places like Madison County, Mississippi, and Louisa County, Virginia. 

This geographic shift has been driven by the artificial intelligence boom fueling record demand and by power constraints in the industry’s traditional hubs like Northern Virginia, Silicon Valley and Chicago, which have made large-scale development there all but impossible.