Oklo (OKLO): Consuming Nuclear Waste To Power AI

Why AI Is Driving a New Nuclear Power Cycle

As the booming demand for energy by AI data centers is completely changing the forecast for energy consumption in the coming decade, more power generation is needed fast.

Ideally, it should come from carbon-neutral renewable sources like solar and wind. In practice, utility-scale batteries are only getting started and are not yet enough to ensure that intermittent renewables can be relied upon for continuous operations of data centers.

This is why the tech industry has been turning toward nuclear energy instead. The early moves have been of restarting recently closed conventional nuclear power plants, like the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, which is being restarted in partnership with Microsoft.

But as tens or even hundreds of GW worth of data centers are being built, new nuclear reactors are needed. Unfortunately, conventional nuclear designs are slow to build, burdened by complex permitting, and still carry public stigma from past incidents such as Fukushima and Chernobyl.

This is why a new generation of nuclear power plants, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), is the new trend of the nuclear industry. They are expected to be quicker to build, cheaper once built in series, and more flexible in their deployment.

Many SMR designs are replicating, on a smaller scale, the pressurized nuclear plants that the industry is familiar with. But some are moving a step beyond into the 4th generation of nuclear power plants, with one company having captured a lot of investors’ attention: Oklo.

The Ongoing Nuclear Renaissance

A Strategic Concern

Depending on the adoption rate and data center build-out speed, data centers could see their energy requirements multiply by 2x-6x by 2030.

This demand for energy will be difficult to satisfy in the West, where power grids have long been neglected and power generation mostly stagnant. Meanwhile, conventional nuclear power has only planned to rise in emerging countries for the late 2020s.

Source: The Economist

So while AI model companies might have a head start in the West, constraints on power generation might ultimately give an advantage to China. This is why SMRs are now being embraced both by policymakers and AI companies to bridge the gap.

For example, Google signed with Kairos for up to 500 MW of SMR capacity starting in 2030, while X-energy plans to deploy 12 Xe-100 reactors in Washington State to service Amazon.

Source: GE Vernova

Not All SMRs Are Equal

All SMRs have a few characteristics in common that distinguish them from classical nuclear power plants:

• Small: power output of a single module is around 5-10% of a conventional power plant.
• Standardized & mass manufactured: the design can be built in series in a factory, and shipped to the power plant site or final customers, without custom design, re-engineering, etc.
• Safer: lower power output and fuel inventory reduce the risk of a nuclear incident and its severity if it somehow still happens.
• Easier to deploy: a much smaller Emergency Planning Zone (EPZ) than traditional plants, and a pre-approved design speeds up and reduces the cost of the permitting process.

Still, there can be a significant difference between SMRs. While some are replicating older designs, just smaller, others are embracing innovations made by the nuclear industry in the past few decades to be safer & more productive.

SMR Designs Compared (Oklo vs Key Rivals)

Swipe to scroll →

How to read this: Light-water designs generally face fewer first-of-kind technical questions, while advanced designs (fast, molten salt, HTGR) target step-change economics or fuel flexibility—but carry more execution and licensing uncertainty.

Oklo: Company Overview and Strategic Positioning

The company was founded in 2013 and derived its name from Oklo, a region in the country of Gabon in Africa, where self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions occurred approximately 1.7 billion years ago.

Oklo has been for a long time deeply tied to AI technology, as OpenAI founder Sam Altman served as chairman of Oklo, guiding it to public markets via a SPAC.

In early 2025, Altman stepped down to “avoid conflict of interest” and facilitate future partnerships, but Oklo remains firmly positioned as an “SMR for AI” company.

The company is developing a molten salt (liquid metal cooled), fast reactor SMR.

Besides Sam Altman, it has also received backing by Peter Thiel and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and other venture capitalist firms. Oklo also receives support from the Department of Energy and the Idaho National Laboratory.

Oklo’s Unique Technology

Fast Reactors

This is where Oklo is different from most other SMR companies.

Oklo’s design differs from traditional reactors; it is a “fast reactor” capable of recycling nuclear waste. This potentially alleviates uranium supply constraints, as US waste stockpiles alone contain enough energy to power the country for 150 years.

The way fast reactors work is by using high-energy neutrons, traveling at roughly 10% the speed of light.

This faster speed can use uranium fuel that otherwise would stay unproductive in a conventional reactor. As a result, fast nuclear reactors can extract several times more usable energy from uranium than conventional light-water reactors, especially when paired with recycled or transuranic fuel streams.

Fast reactors have the advantage of not needing freshly mined uranium, which might be important as the industry is looking at potential years or a decade of supply deficits.

Source: WNA

Oklo’s Designs

Where Oklo differs is that its fast reactor is not a “breeder” reactor, so it does not generate more fuel from mined uranium. Instead, it is designed to consume the accumulated nuclear waste from other reactors.

An additional benefit of consuming transuranic elements is that the remaining waste stream is dominated by shorter-lived fission products, reducing the timeframe for high-level radiotoxicity from tens of thousands of years to centuries rather than millennia.

The shorter lifespan of the waste is thanks to fast reactors consuming transuranic materials (heavier than uranium), which also drastically reduce nuclear proliferation risks (it destroys the material used in nuclear weapons like plutonium). Fast neutron reactors can also fission a much wider range of fuel isotopes, while also being less sensitive to impurities found in recycled used nuclear fuel.

Source: Oklo

The company’s design is looking to rebuild from first principles the concept of a nuclear reactor, moving away from the practice of the industry to only use custom-made parts, similar to how SpaceX cut costs radically for its rockets.

For example, its choice of non-pressurized operations removes the need for complex and expensive components and overall simplifies the design, requiring fewer parts.

The liquid metal cooling system (molten salts) is also the direction the nuclear industry is taking, over water-cooled designs, thanks to its inherently superior safety profile and its ability to leverage modern supply chains.

Oklo’s reactors will also be highly reliable and require little downtime, as they need refueling as little as every 20 years.

The much smaller footprint helps create a nuclear plant site that looks completely different from the traditional, hulking power plants, with its concept Aurora powerhouse product line, able to produce up to 75MWe (megawatt equivalents) of electric power, able to produce either electricity or directly heat.

Source: Oklo

The company will leverage Siemens expertise for the steam turbine part of the reactor, with the procurement of the turbines already ongoing.

Technical and Economic Challenges of Fast Reactors

Despite their advantages, fast reactors are more complicated to design than light-water ones, which has historically played against them.

As a result, only a design that amortizes the cost of R&D over many times the same reactor being built could have a chance to be cost-competitive with light water reactors. Luckily, the modularity and serial manufacturing of SMRs should help alleviate this issue.

Another issue is the reprocessing of nuclear fuel, which tends to be relatively more expensive than freshly mined and enriched uranium.

However, as we already have nuclear waste being produced constantly, which needs to be processed anyway, the same cost can instead be used to create fuel for fast reactors, rather than 10,000+ years-lasting toxic wastes. So this part of the equation is very different from the 1960s-1970s when fast reactors fell out of favor.

Oklo took the matter into its own hands, building a $1.68B advanced fuel recycling center in Tennessee, which started to be built in April 2025.

The energy that can be unlocked via recycling from the 94,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel stored in the USA is equivalent to about 1.3 trillion barrels of oil, or five times the reserves of Saudi Arabia.

Oklo’s Progress & Timeline

SMR Build-Up

Despite being one of the early SMR companies, Oklo has progressed somewhat slower than some of its competitors, like NuScale (SMR +0.23%), in part due to its innovative liquid metal-cooled, fast reactor technical choice.

Still, the company expects to deploy its first 75 MW reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) by late 2027 or early 2028.

The company has also signed several deals with companies eager for a quick supply of reliable power.

One of them is a 1.2 GW project for Meta, for Power Ohio. It will support data center deployment, while also connecting to the Ohio power grid, and is privately financed, at no cost to Ohio electricity users, while creating thousands of jobs across multiple years-long construction and operations. The project should see its first power online by 2030.

Another even more important project is a massive 12 GW agreement with data center (including AI data center) operator Switch, making it one of the largest corporate power agreements in history. This is a long-term plan, as it expects Oklo to deploy many of its Aurora powerhouse projects through 2044 to fulfill it.

Radioisotopes

While SMRs will form the bulk of the company’s activity in the long run, it has added a “side business” that might generate revenues sooner: medical radioisotopes.

Radioisotopes are expected to represent a $55.7 billion market opportunity by 2026.

The move into this market by Oklo started with the acquisition of Atomic Alchemy in 2024 for $25M.

Oklo is building a radioisotope pilot plant under the DoE Reactor Pilot Program (RPP), which was approved in January 2026. While no launch data have been given yet, this could help Oklo maximize the revenue from the nuclear fuel it will be using for its SMRs.

Isotope transformation and utilization of nuclear reactions could go beyond medical applications and back to the semiconductor/AI industries. Atomic Alchemy’s technologies notably use Neutron Transmutation Doping of silicon (NTD) to convert some of the silicon atoms into phosphorus atoms. Fine-tuning the reaction could lead to a new method of “doping” of semiconductor material that is more precise and consistent than the existing methods so far.

Rare isotopes can also be used for commercial Radioisotope Power Systems (RPSs) or “nuclear batteries”, a topic on which Oklo has a partnership with the company Zeno Power. RPS are used in space probes and are promising to be important for seabed exploration and lunar bases.

Oklo Investment Thesis: Risks, Catalysts, and Outlook

There are many SMR companies pushing for a renewal of the nuclear industry at the moment. Thanks to the sudden growth in power demand expectations linked to AI, it is likely that all SMR companies will find a part of the market welcoming them.

Often tied to AI development, due to its connection to Sam Altman, Oklo and other SMR companies will also benefit from non-AI-related reindustrialization efforts, with the US actively looking to bring back production of critical metals, pharmaceuticals, defense products, etc.

Some companies, like NuScale, played it safe with a more conventional design, managing to get approval from regulators more quickly.

Others, like Oklo, have carved themselves a niche in the market, with the company shielded from potential uranium shortages thanks to its choice of fast reactor powered by nuclear waste.

After a longer-than-expected delay, Oklo is now passing critical regulatory milestones and back on track for a deployment of its first SMRs and production of radioisotopes in the next few years.

This should then give the company the cash flow to accelerate production without further capital dilution, or boost the stock price high enough that dilution is limited, bringing investors to trust the stock further.

Latest Oklo (OKLO) Stock News and Developments

What Comes Next

Over the next 24 months, Oklo’s valuation will hinge on regulatory execution, first-site construction milestones, and early revenue traction from radioisotopes. If initial Aurora deployments proceed on schedule, Oklo could emerge as one of the few advanced nuclear companies to transition from promise to operating reality.

Learn more about SMR technology and energy innovations here.