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Data centers are power-hungry beasts, and the industry’s rapid expansion is bumping up against the physical limits of the grid. A wave of venture capital and corporate investment is flooding into nuclear startups developing small modular reactors, or SMRs. They’re smaller, theoretically cheaper, and designed to be manufactured in factories rather than built on-site over decades.
The money trail from chips to reactors
X-energy raised over $500 million in 2024 with backing from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, then followed that up with an additional $700 million in late 2025. That’s $1.2 billion flowing into a single nuclear startup in roughly 18 months.
TerraPower, the nuclear venture co-founded by Bill Gates, secured $650 million in a round that included NVentures, the venture arm of NVIDIA.
Oklo, backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, reached an agreement with Meta to develop a 1.2 GW campus in Ohio and is set to list on the NYSE.
Aalo Atomics closed a $100 million Series B led by Valor Equity Partners. Kairos Power signed a deal with Google in 2024 targeting 500 MW of advanced nuclear capacity by 2035.
The July 4, 2026 deadline
The US Department of Energy has set a target of July 4, 2026, for several of these startups to achieve reactor criticality — the point where a nuclear reactor sustains a controlled chain reaction for the first time. Aalo Atomics is specifically targeting that date for its own criticality milestone.
A reality check on the scale
The over $100 billion in annual capital expenditures that Big Tech allocates to data center infrastructure dwarfs the billions flowing into nuclear startups. Kairos Power’s Google deal targets 500 MW by 2035, a full decade from now.
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