Rolls-Royce SMR is not expected to reach a final investment decision on its UK reactor program until 2029, three years after this week’s memorandum of understanding with ABB was signed. The agreement is also not ABB’s only recent nuclear partnership: the company has struck similar automation and electrification arrangements with Sweden’s Blykalla and US-based Paragon over the past two years, a pattern that spreads ABB’s exposure across several competing reactor designs rather than committing it to any single one.
ABB’s non-binding agreement with Rolls-Royce SMR covers exploration of how the Swiss engineering company’s automation, electrification, instrumentation and communication technology could support delivery of Rolls-Royce’s 470 megawatt pressurised water reactor design, a unit intended to be 90% factory-built with on-site work limited mainly to assembling pre-tested modules. That design remains at an early commercial stage. Rolls-Royce SMR was selected as the UK government’s preferred technology for the country’s first domestic SMR project in June 2025, beating GE Hitachi, Holtec and Westinghouse in a process that had earlier eliminated NuScale, and the UK government named Wylfa in North Wales as the host site in November, but a final investment decision on that UK program is not expected until 2029. The company’s most concrete external validation to date comes from the Czech Republic, where utility ČEZ selected Rolls-Royce SMR in October 2024 to deploy up to 3 gigawatts of capacity and took a 20% equity stake, followed by an early works agreement covering licensing, permitting and site-specific design at the Temelín site. That agreement authorizes preparatory and regulatory work, not reactor construction, which has not begun at either the Czech or UK sites.
ABB’s agreement with Rolls-Royce SMR is also not an isolated bet. The company signed a memorandum of understanding with Swedish lead-cooled SMR developer Blykalla in October 2024 covering automation, electrification and digitalisation support for Blykalla’s SEALER-E prototype, followed by a second MoU in September 2024 focused on maritime deployment of the same lead-cooled technology and a Joint Development Agreement in May 2025 that formalized the collaboration further. Separately, ABB signed a memorandum of understanding with US-based Paragon in September 2025 covering integrated instrumentation, control and electrification technology for the broader US nuclear power industry, not tied to any single reactor design. Taken together, these agreements show ABB establishing parallel, non-exclusive relationships with reactor developers pursuing distinct technologies, pressurised water, lead-cooled, and a generalized US market position, rather than concentrating its nuclear strategy on any one company’s design succeeding.
That hedged posture mirrors how utility customers in the SMR market are behaving at this stage of the sector’s development, not just how suppliers like ABB are positioning themselves. Sweden’s Vattenfall has shortlisted both GE Vernova-Hitachi’s BWRX-300 and the Rolls-Royce SMR for a 1,500 megawatt project, structured as either five BWRX-300 units or three Rolls-Royce units, and has said it will apply for state risk-sharing support before selecting a final supplier, keeping both technology options open rather than committing early. That parallel evaluation approach, applied by a prospective buyer choosing between reactor vendors, is functionally similar to ABB maintaining automation partnerships across several of those same vendors simultaneously; both reflect a market where no Western SMR design has yet reached commercial operation and genuine uncertainty remains about which technologies will clear the financing, licensing and construction milestones still ahead of them.
The broader SMR sector’s track record gives that caution a concrete basis. NuScale Power remains the only company anywhere with a Nuclear Regulatory Commission-certified SMR design, having received Design Certification in 2023 and Standard Design Approval for an uprated module in 2025, yet its first planned commercial deployment, the Carbon Free Power Project in Idaho, was cancelled in 2023 after its utility offtaker, a coalition of municipal power providers, withdrew from the agreement. NuScale was subsequently eliminated from the UK’s own SMR technology competition before the final round that Rolls-Royce SMR went on to win. That history, the most advanced Western SMR design by regulatory status still failing to reach construction on its first attempt, is the backdrop against which ABB’s new automation partnership with a design that has not yet secured its own final investment decision should be read. Industry coverage of this week’s agreement cited a global ambition of up to 120 gigawatts of installed SMR capacity by 2050, a target that describes a market with essentially no operating commercial capacity in the West today, and against which a memorandum of understanding to “explore collaboration opportunities,” in the companies’ own phrasing, represents an early option on a still-unproven category rather than a signal that Rolls-Royce SMR’s specific design has cleared the obstacles that have stalled its most credentialed competitor.
