Meta, Google and Amazon sign power deals with small reactor developers
Nuclear startup Oklo has begun site work at the Idaho National Laboratory on what would be among the first new commercial nuclear reactors built in the United States in a generation, part of a 22-project push to deploy small modular reactors (SMRs) for the artificial-intelligence data centers driving U.S. power demand.
At least 130 SMR designs are in development worldwide, according to the World Nuclear Association, and Meta, Google and Amazon have signed power-purchase agreements with SMR developers before any of the designs have reached commercial operation in the United States. Microsoft has separately agreed to a 20-year conventional reactor power deal. The build-out is the first since two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors came online in 2023 and 2024 at costs that exceeded $30 billion, years behind schedule.
In Butte County, Idaho, on a desert campus that spans an area nearly twice the size of Los Angeles, Oklo’s excavation pit sits among Cold War-era buildings still in use at the national lab, established in 1949 as the test site for the first naval and civilian nuclear-power reactors. Four other companies — Aalo Atomics, Antares Nuclear, Radiant Nuclear and Deployable Energy — are also developing or testing small reactors at the campus, hoping to channel the success of its storied past.
“We’re doing stuff that I didn’t ever think we’d do again in my career,” said Brady Orchard, project director of the lab’s Materials and Fuels Complex, where he has worked for 19 years. “It’s been analyze, analyze, analyze, and the focus now is, ‘Do the right analysis, but let’s build, too.’ … Everybody wants to be first.”
Oklo’s first major commercial project would send electricity to the grid to support data centers operated by Meta Platforms, the parent of Facebook. Eventually, the company plans to build more than a dozen reactors at an Ohio campus that could generate up to 1.2 gigawatts — enough to power 1,200 Walmarts, Oklo has said. The Idaho site is one of 22 active reactor projects in the U.S. according to the think tank Third Way.
Meta’s pairings with both Oklo and TerraPower grew out of a request-for-proposal process Carolyn Campbell, then Meta’s head of clean technology innovation, and her team ran in late 2024. Campbell said Meta’s goal is to help developers reach “cost competitiveness sooner rather than later, were it not for our involvement.”
Google has paired with Kairos Power. Amazon.com invested in, and is a customer of, X-energy, which went public earlier this year. Microsoft agreed in 2024 to a 20-year power deal supporting Constellation Energy’s planned restart of an undamaged conventional reactor at Pennsylvania’s former Three Mile Island site, the location of the most infamous U.S. nuclear accident — a conventional reactor rather than an SMR partnership, The Wall Street Journal reported. “I don’t know that the goal is necessarily to be a first mover, but to be an early adopter,” Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said of SMRs.
Amazon’s 2024 deal with X-energy marked an inflection point, said Michael Johnson, managing director for JPMorgan Chase’s security and resiliency initiative. “It was private capital formation and offtake and real support from Amazon that had people believe not just in the future of X-energy, but in the future of small modular reactors,” Johnson said. Shares of Oklo and NuScale, the two SMR firms publicly traded at the time, “took off,” he added. “That was the wake-up call.”
Capital has followed into what had been a sleepy sector. PitchBook tracked $2.9 billion in venture-capital fundraising at fission companies last year, up from $103 million in 2020. Oklo, which was backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and went public in 2024, said it grossed around $307 million in its public debut and has since raised around $3.2 billion in stock sales. At least 10 other reactor designers, including X-energy, have gone public or plan to do so.
“I think everyone’s view was like, hey, maybe you can raise a couple hundred million dollars at most over a life cycle,” Oklo co-founder and chief executive Jacob DeWitte said. “And now it’s like no, there’s billions of dollars flowing in.”
That is, however, beginning to look like peak hype to some investors. Oklo’s market value swelled above $30 billion at its peak last fall and has since fallen to about $8.2 billion — still approaching the level of some established energy companies such as AES, a Virginia-based utility with more than 30,000 megawatts of generation. Shares of Oklo, NuScale and X-energy have fallen sharply this year; the stocks tend to trade in line with the latest headlines about the trajectory of AI and are subject to large one-day swings.
Ray Rothrock, an early investor in several advanced-reactor companies, including Oklo, said he expects only a small number of SMR developers to survive. “It’s a single digit,” Rothrock said of likely survivors. “It’s not a double digit.” JPMorgan’s Johnson said the market appears to have room for three to six SMR companies.
Cost and engineering complexity remain open questions. TerraPower, founded by Bill Gates almost 20 years ago, received a construction license in March for a Wyoming project after a shortened review period of about 18 months — but it took 1,000 engineers to make that happen, Chief Executive Chris Levesque said. “Have you done the thousand-person design? There’s no shortcut,” Levesque said. “Because this is a smaller reactor doesn’t mean a smaller design effort because it’s still fission.” Rothrock said large conventional reactors, such as the AP1000, are likely to provide most of the nuclear capacity built over the next few decades, with SMRs occupying narrower markets including heavy industry.
Working in Oklo’s favor are political ties. Energy Secretary Chris Wright once served on the company’s board. DeWitte was present at the White House last year when President Trump signed an executive order meant to accelerate nuclear power, and in March he was appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology alongside technology executives including Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg.
The U.S. energy mix includes 94 operating reactors, according to Energy Department data, that provide about 20% of the nation’s electricity; a Michigan reactor is expected to restart later this year. Guggenheim Securities analysts project Oklo could have 1.1 gigawatts of assets by 2032, though they say free cash flow will likely be “further off as long as the company continues to add assets.”