WASHINGTON, Oct 16 (Reuters) - Amazon.com ( AMZN ) said

on Wednesday it has signed three agreements on developing the

nuclear power technology called small modular reactors, becoming

the latest big tech company to push for new sources to meet

surging electricity demand from data centers.

Amazon ( AMZN ) said it will fund a feasibility study for an SMR

project near a Northwest Energy site in Washington state. The

SMR is planned to be developed by X-Energy. Financial details

were not disclosed.

Under the agreement, Amazon ( AMZN ) will have the right to purchase

electricity from four modules. Energy Northwest, a consortium of

state public utilities, will have the option to add up to eight

80 MW modules, resulting in a total capacity up to 960 MWs, or

enough to power the equivalent of more than 770,000 U.S. homes.

The additional power would be available to Amazon ( AMZN ) and utilities

to power homes and businesses.

"Our agreements will encourage the construction of new

nuclear technologies that will generate energy for decades to

come," said Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services.

SMRs will have their components built in a factory to reduce

construction costs. Today's larger reactors are built onsite.

Critics of SMRs say they will be too expensive to achieve the

desired economies of scale.

Nuclear power, which generates electricity virtually free of

greenhouse gas emissions and provides high-paying union jobs,

gets wide support from both Democrats and Republicans.

But no U.S. SMRs exist yet. NuScale, the only U.S.

company with an SMR design license from the U.S. Nuclear

Regulatory Commission, last year had to axe the first SMR

project to build its technology at a U.S. lab in Idaho.

In addition, SMRs will produce long-lasting radioactive

nuclear waste for which the U.S. does not yet have a final

repository.

Scott Burnell, a spokesperson at the U.S. NRC, said "no

specifics" about the planned SMRs been presented yet to the

regulator.

DATA CENTERS

Tech firms have signed a rash of agreements with nuclear

companies this year as artificial intelligence boosts U.S. power

demand for the first time in decades, though time-lines for

nuclear projects tend to lag goals by years.

U.S. data center power use is expected to roughly triple

between 2023 and 2030 and will require about 47 gigawatts of new

generation capacity, according to Goldman Sachs estimates.

Goldman assumed natural gas, wind and solar power would fill the

gap.

Amazon ( AMZN ) said it is also leading a funding round for $500

million to support X-Energy's development of SMRs. Amazon ( AMZN ) and

X-Energy aim to bring more than 5 gigawatts online in the United

States by 2039, which the companies call the largest commercial

deployment target of SMRs yet.

Amazon ( AMZN ) also signed an agreement with Dominion Energy ( D )

to explore the development of an SMR project near the

utility's existing power station in Virginia. The about 300

megawatt project would help meet power needs in a region where

demand is expected to jump 85% in 15 years, Dominion said.

On Monday Alphabet's Google signed an agreement

with Kairos Power to bring an SMR online by 2030, with more

deployments through 2035.

In March, Amazon ( AMZN ) purchased a nuclear-powered datacenter from

Talen Energy ( TLN ). Last month, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and

Constellation Energy ( CEG ) signed a power deal to help

resurrect a unit of the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania,

the site of the worst U.S. nuclear accident in 1979.