Voters pushed Amazon's data center away from Calvert Cliffs — Amazon bought the nuclear plant's power anyway

In August Amazon Web Services withdrew its application for a data center campus next to Constellation Energy's Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Calvert County, Maryland. The plan called for eight buildings totalling more than 2.46 million square feet and about 500 MW of power, supplied directly by the plant. AWS cited development timelines, rigid operating requirements and how fast it could deliver capacity; the decision followed strong voter opposition to hyperscale data centers in the county's 23 June primary. Two months later, Amazon and Constellation announced a 20-year power purchase agreement under which Amazon will buy 690 MW of Calvert Cliffs' output, including 190 MW of new capacity Constellation plans to add through an uprate. Local reporting puts the upgrade at about $3 billion.

Why it matters

The fights over AI infrastructure this autumn have mostly been framed as data center versus community, and in Calvert County the community won. But the deal that followed shows what the hyperscaler actually needed from the site, and it was not the land. It was the nuclear plant's output, under a long contract, and that it got without building anything next to the reactor.

That separation is worth noticing because it changes which projects are exposed to local backlash. A campus is visible, local, and votable. A power purchase agreement is a financial contract over electricity that moves on the grid, and it can be signed with a plant in one county for a data center somewhere else. Nine days ago Oracle's Stargate campus stalled because a gas pipeline needed to cross state land. Here the opposite route worked: leave the site, keep the power.

The uprate is the tracked part. 190 MW of new nuclear capacity at an existing plant, paid for by an AI buyer's 20-year commitment, is typically the cheapest and fastest kind of new nuclear — no new reactor, no new site, a licence amendment rather than a construction permit. It is capacity that can plausibly arrive this decade, which is more than most SMR projects in this tracker can promise.

What to watch

The NRC's review of the Calvert Cliffs uprate and when the new capacity comes online, where Amazon builds the data center that this power will serve, and whether other hyperscalers adopt the same split between site and supply.