Silicon Valley Invests Heavily in Nuclear Startups Amid AI Power Demand

Data centers are devouring electricity at an unprecedented rate, straining the power grid to its limits. Venture capital and corporate investors are pouring billions into nuclear startups developing small modular reactors (SMRs), which promise to be smaller, cheaper, and more efficient than traditional nuclear plants.

X-energy has raised over $1.2 billion in just 18 months from Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund and other investors, while TerraPower, co-founded by Bill Gates, secured $650 million with backing from NVIDIA's venture arm NVentures.

Oklo, backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is set to list on the NYSE after reaching an agreement with Meta to develop a 1.2 GW campus in Ohio. Aalo Atomics closed a $100 million Series B led by Valor Equity Partners, and Kairos Power signed a deal with Google targeting 500 MW of advanced nuclear capacity by 2035.

The US Department of Energy has set a target for several startups to achieve reactor criticality, the point where a nuclear reactor sustains a controlled chain reaction, by July 4, 2026. Aalo Atomics is specifically targeting this date for its own criticality milestone.