Amazon’s new megadeal is like the old Hair Club For Men ads – and deep-dish pizza

Or maybe it’s just like Rivian? Plus Senate Dems embrace ⚛️.

Do you remember the grainy old Hair Club For Men commercials from the 1980s? Let me jog your memory: After promising a mail-order cure for thinning hair, the company's numb-looking but well-coiffed chief executive holds up a photo of himself with a bald pate and says he’s “not only the president, I’m also a client.”

Amazon’s megadeal to enter the nuclear power business this week followed a similar logic.

Last month, as you may recall, Microsoft inked a $16 billion contract to buy power for the next 20 years from the defunct Three Mile Island nuclear plant, part of a plan to reverse the station’s shutdown. On Monday, Google announced a deal to purchase up to 500 megawatts of electricity from the next-generation nuclear startup Kairos once its first commercial reactors are built. 

But on Wednesday, Amazon came in with one of the most consequential deals of all. The company agreed to buy as much as 5 gigawatts – 5,000 megawatts – of electricity from new nuclear plants to power its Amazon Web Services data centers. And it’s bought a stake in X-energy, the reactor startup whose technology it wants to bring to market.

The Hair Club For Men analogy is one Brett Rampal, the veteran nuclear investor, used when we chatted about it Wednesday morning. 

The comparison I made was a little more boring. 

When Amazon started electrifying its fleet of delivery vans a few years ago, the company bought a double-digit stake in the automaker producing its trucks: Rivian. The Jeff Bezos-founded firm seems to be taking a similar approach with X-energy. 

This is a big deal for the nuclear business. Next-generation reactors, also sometimes called Gen IV or “advanced” reactors, describe types of power units equipped with modern safety technologies and that use molten salt, high-temperature gas or some other kind of coolant other than water. Among other potential advantages, this feature allows these “advanced” reactors to run hotter, making them useful for industrial heat applications that currently require fossil fuels. 

That’s why X-energy’s first big corporate deal was with Dow Chemical, to build one of its 80-megawatt high-temperature gas reactors at a petrochemical facility on the Gulf of Mexico. 

The jury is still out on whether these units are better suited to generating electricity than traditional large-scale light water reactors. 

But unlike Dow Chemical, which made future investment in X-energy contingent on hitting certain milestones, Amazon went all in, leading a $500 million funding round along with billionaire Ken Griffin into the company. That will help X-energy get through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing process and finance the inevitable billion-dollar cost overruns that come when building a first-of-a-kind reactor. 

Now for the pizza metaphor. I asked Craig Piercy, the president of the American Nuclear Society, what this means for the state of play for advanced reactors. He said the sector could be thought of like the tomato casserole that Chicagoans for some reason refer to as the flatbread we New Yorkers fold and eat. 

“Advanced nuclear is kind of like deep-dish pizza. All the ingredients are in place, you’ve got the sauce, the cheese, all the toppings are prepared, but the thing about deep dish is you have to have it in the oven for a while before it’s ready,” Piercy told me. “I see all the pieces for advanced nuclear in place, but you still have the regulatory process you have to go through, you still have to build the supply chain, you still have to build the workforce.”

You can read the full story here on HuffPost. 

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The big tech news appears to only have whetted Democrats’ appetite for an energy source the party once fought against. 

Last week, as you may recall, I watched the Arizona Senate debate and noticed when Democrat Ruben Gallego responded to a question about rising temperatures with one big and specific answer: more nuclear reactors. A few days later, I watched Democrat Elissa Slotkin namecheck nuclear power in her own climate answer in the final Michigan Senate debate.

Then, during a call about another topic, I asked Florida’s Democratic Senate nominee Debbie Mucarsel-Powell what she thought about atomic energy; she said she wants more of it. Texas Democrat Colin Allred, who is making a spirited challenge to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, told me he agreed. 

So I wrapped that together into a story that tracks how Democrats came out to nuclear power over the past decade. The Obama administration offered some useful contrasts. 

You can read that full story here on HuffPost. 

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PROGRAMMING NOTE: Over the weekend, HuffPost started publishing the three-part series I went down to Puerto Rico to report in July. I’ll write a separate newsletter this week outlining the project. But if you want to get a leg up on reading the stories, parts one, two, and three are now all available online. 

Thank you, as always, for your time and attention. I hope you felt this update on big tech’s nuclear deals and the election earned it. If not, maybe this song recommendation will.

It’s called “Little Room” by Sven Wegner, a German house DJ who’s been around since the early 1990s and has mastered the jazzy, soulful deep house sound for which I’m a total sucker. I love really listening to the song, but it’s objectively great background music. 

If you liked this newsletter, please consider sending it around or upgrading your subscription. I rely on readers like you to make the effort this takes worth the time. 

Signing off from crisp Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the leaves of the linden trees that tower over Shore Road park have begun to change colors. Maybe the realtors promoting luxury condos down the streets as part of Brooklyn’s “Golden Coast” have a point.