X-energy Joins Project Prometheus, Supporting AI-Driven Nuclear Energy R&D with Xe-100 and TRISO-X

On July 22, X-energy announced it had become a founding member of the "Prometheus" initiative and would participate as a Tier 1 partner. Led by Idaho National Laboratory (INL), NVIDIA, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the initiative aims to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the research, development, and deployment of advanced nuclear energy.

According to the announcement, the Prometheus initiative brings together 32 U.S. laboratories, universities, and private technology developers for a three-year research program. Backed by $60 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s "Genesis Mission," the initiative focuses on addressing challenges such as long development cycles and high operating costs associated with advanced nuclear technologies. It explores AI applications across the entire lifecycle, including reactor design, licensing, manufacturing, construction, operation, and fuel fabrication.

X-energy will contribute $10 million in private capital to the initiative and provide access to design and manufacturing data for its Xe-100 small modular high-temperature gas-cooled reactor and TRISO-X fuel. The company stated that the Xe-100 and TRISO-X fuel will serve as the technical platform for the three-year project, which will combine DOE test reactor resources and supercomputing capabilities to integrate advanced AI models into nuclear engineering workflows and fuel production processes.

X-energy CEO J. Clay Sell expressed the company's honor in joining the alliance and noted that the research findings would be applied to meet future energy and infrastructure needs.

Participation in the Prometheus initiative will also align with X-energy’s proprietary APEX platform. APEX is an internal multi-agent platform currently utilized by the company's engineering, licensing, and operations teams to support daily decision-making and technical analysis. X-energy stated that this platform would facilitate the adoption and expansion of research outcomes derived from the Genesis Mission.

Currently, X-energy is collaborating with Dow, Amazon, and Centrica to advance new nuclear power projects totaling over 11 gigawatts and the commercial deployment of the Xe-100 reactor in the United States and the United Kingdom. Under the agreement, X-energy and Amazon have the option to deploy over 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generation capacity by 2039 to support grid reliability and the power needs of AWS data centers.

X-energy is a company that designs advanced small modular reactors and nuclear fuel technologies; its core technologies include the Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled reactor and TRISO-X particle fuel. The company states that its technologies target applications such as grid power supply, industrial energy use, and AI infrastructure, with a focus on enhancing the safety, construction efficiency, and scalability of nuclear energy projects.