NRC recommends licences for four Westinghouse reactors at Fermi's Texas AI campus

NRC staff have preliminarily recommended combined licences for four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at Project Matador, Fermi America's planned power and AI campus outside Amarillo, Texas. The draft environmental impact statement went out for public comment on October 9, fifteen months after Fermi submitted its application — and Fermi wrote much of it itself.

The document was the first test of an NRC pilot program that lets applicants prepare their own environmental reviews under staff supervision. The regulator expects the approach to cut its in-house review time by roughly half, with a final statement targeted for December. The safety review, notably, still has no schedule.

The agency's capacity has been the subject of its own news cycle: the NRC lost about a sixth of its staff, falling from 2,957 to 2,477 employees, yet approved the first small modular reactor four months ahead of schedule. A separate security review — for laser-enrichment firm LIS Technologies at Oak Ridge — took 246 days while enrichment prices hit record highs. The bottleneck in Western nuclear power was never the reactor physics; it was the paperwork, and the paperwork moves faster the fewer people there are to check it.

The commercial picture behind the licences is less tidy. Fermi's stock fell 50 percent in December when a prospective tenant walked away from a $150 million construction funding agreement. In April, shares dropped another 22 percent after the board ousted co-founder and CEO Toby Neugebauer and the CFO resigned. Neugebauer, still the largest shareholder, has since sued three directors, and a Texas Business Court judge last month declined to block a 70 percent supermajority bylaw adopted after his ouster.

The anchor tenant is now TensorWave, an AMD-only GPU cloud, which in August signed a binding 15-year lease for 222 MW worth about $6.5 billion, with options past 650 MW. On Tuesday, AMD agreed to provide credit support for that lease — the same AMD that sells TensorWave its chips and has invested in the company. Fermi has taken delivery of six Siemens SGT-800 turbines and three larger Siemens F-class units, with three GE Vernova turbines recently arrived on site. Last November, Fermi promised 1 GW of capacity online by late 2026; by August the target had shrunk to about 200 MW over the next six months.

Fermi wants its first reactor running by 2032, pending a mandatory hearing, a Commission vote, and the site-specific application it plans to refile by December 31. The regulator, for its part, is now reviewing reactors on a timeline set by how much of the review the applicant performs.