Oklo
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Oklo Inc. (NYSE: OKLO) is an American advanced-fission company developing the Aurora "powerhouse," a small sodium-cooled fast reactor that the company plans to build, own, and operate to sell electricity directly to customers under long-term contracts. Founded in 2013 by Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran, two MIT-trained nuclear engineers, and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Oklo went public in May 2024 by merging with AltC Acquisition Corp, a special-purpose acquisition company co-founded by Sam Altman, who served as Oklo's board chairman until April 2025. The company is positioning itself as a supplier of round-the-clock carbon-free power for AI data centers, and it has signed framework agreements and prepayment deals with operators including Switch, Equinix, and Meta. Oklo has no operating revenue, no reactor in operation, and no approved commercial license; its first plant is targeted for Idaho National Laboratory around late 2027 or 2028. It matters because it is one of the most visible attempts to pair advanced nuclear power with the surging electricity demand of generative AI, and because its valuation has swung wildly on that promise rather than on delivered results.
Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran met as graduate students in nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded Oklo in 2013. The company passed through the MassChallenge accelerator and Y Combinator's 2014 cohort, raising only small early rounds. The name comes from Oklo, a region in Gabon where uranium deposits sustained natural fission chain reactions roughly two billion years ago, the only known place on Earth where self-sustaining nuclear reactions occurred without human intervention. Early backers included Hydrazine Capital, the fund co-founded by Sam Altman with Peter Thiel as its limited partner, along with venture investors such as Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, and Tim Draper. DeWitte serves as chief executive and Cochran as chief operating officer; both sit on the board.
In July 2023, Oklo agreed to merge with AltC Acquisition Corp, a blank-check company that Altman had co-founded with investor Michael Klein. Shareholders approved the combination, which closed on May 9, 2024, and Oklo's stock began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker OKLO on May 10, 2024. The deal raised gross proceeds of roughly $306 million. Unlike many SPAC debuts, Oklo's shares fell sharply in their first days of trading, sliding well below the nominal $10 SPAC price before recovering later in the year. The company did not raise money by selling reactors or generating revenue; it remained a pre-revenue developer funded by the SPAC cash and subsequent equity sales.
Altman chaired Oklo's board from the merger until April 2025, when he stepped down. Both Oklo and press reporting framed the move as a way to remove a conflict of interest, since OpenAI, which Altman leads, is a massive prospective buyer of data-center power and Oklo wanted freedom to negotiate supply deals with AI companies. DeWitte assumed the role of chairman in addition to chief executive. The Altman association drew enormous retail-investor attention to the stock and tied Oklo's narrative tightly to the AI buildout.
The Aurora is a liquid-metal-cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor descended in design philosophy from Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II), the sodium-cooled research reactor that operated at Idaho National Laboratory until 1994. Oklo's reactor uses high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) metallic fuel and is designed to run for roughly a decade or more between refuelings, with the company emphasizing the ability to consume recovered and recycled nuclear material. Heat from the core is moved to a power-conversion system to generate electricity. Oklo markets the design as a "powerhouse" rather than just a reactor because its business model is to own and operate the plants and sell the output, an approach it contrasts with vendors that sell reactors to utilities.
The Aurora's nameplate has grown substantially over time as Oklo chased the data-center market. It was first presented as a 1.5 MWe heat-pipe microreactor, then scaled to 15 MWe, then to 50 MWe, and on March 26, 2025 Oklo unveiled a 75 MWe version. DeWitte described the 75 MWe size as targeting a "sweet spot" of roughly 60 MW to 72 MW per data hall with margin to spare, and the company said the upsize improved economies of scale and fuel efficiency without introducing new technical or regulatory complexity. The reactor is intended for off-grid and behind-the-meter uses including data centers, industrial sites, remote communities, and military bases. As a class, the Aurora falls within what the industry calls advanced small modular reactors.
| Aurora powerhouse | Detail |
|---|---|
| Reactor type | Liquid-metal (sodium) cooled fast reactor |
| Fuel | Metallic HALEU; designed to use recovered and recycled fuel |
| Heritage | Modeled on Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) |
| Power (current design) | Up to 75 MWe (revealed March 2025) |
| Design history | 1.5 MWe to 15 MWe to 50 MWe to 75 MWe |
| Lead constructor | Kiewit Nuclear Solutions |
| First site | Idaho National Laboratory |
| Target first operation | Late 2027 to 2028 (company guidance) |
Oklo's regulatory path has been uneven. The company filed a "custom" combined license application (COLA) with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 2020 for a 1.5 MWe Aurora at Idaho National Laboratory, the first such application for a commercial advanced fission plant. On January 6, 2022, the NRC denied the application without prejudice, citing Oklo's failure to provide sufficient information on subjects including the reactor's potential accidents and the classification of its safety systems. "Without prejudice" meant Oklo could resubmit with the missing information.
After several years of pre-application engagement, Oklo completed the NRC's pre-application readiness assessment for Phase 1 of a new COLA in 2025, with the agency reporting no significant gaps that would block acceptance. Oklo says it intends to submit the COLA in phases. In early 2026 the NRC accepted and then approved Oklo's Principal Design Criteria topical report for the Aurora, a step the company said the regulator handled faster than its typical timeline. The licensing process remains incomplete: as of mid-2026 Oklo did not hold an NRC license to build or operate a commercial Aurora.
In parallel, Oklo has advanced through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which controls the Idaho site. The company received authorization to begin site characterization at INL in November 2024 and broke ground for its first Aurora powerhouse on September 22, 2025, with Kiewit Nuclear Solutions as lead constructor. The project is expected to create roughly 370 construction jobs and 70 to 80 permanent positions. In May 2025 Oklo was selected for DOE's Reactor Pilot Program, an initiative tied to 2025 executive orders aimed at fast-tracking advanced reactors at federal sites; the program set a goal of reaching criticality in at least three test reactors by July 4, 2026. Oklo and its subsidiary Atomic Alchemy were chosen for three of the eleven announced pilot projects on August 13, 2025, covering the Aurora powerhouse, a plutonium-fueled fast reactor Oklo calls Pluto, and an isotope test reactor called Groves. The DOE granted Nuclear Safety Design Agreement (NSDA) approvals for the Aurora powerhouse and the Aurora Fuel Fabrication Facility at INL.
| Regulatory milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Aurora-INL custom COLA filed with NRC | 2020 |
| NRC denies application without prejudice | January 6, 2022 |
| DOE site characterization authorized at INL | November 2024 |
| Selected for DOE Reactor Pilot Program | May to August 2025 |
| Groundbreaking at Idaho National Laboratory | September 22, 2025 |
| NRC Phase 1 readiness assessment completed | 2025 |
| NRC approves Aurora Principal Design Criteria report | Early 2026 |
Oklo's commercial strategy is to sign power purchase agreements (PPAs) and supply electricity from plants it owns, rather than selling hardware. Because no Aurora is built yet, almost all of its "order book" consists of non-binding letters of intent (LOIs), master agreements, and a small number of prepayment deals. Distinguishing these is important: a prepayment agreement involves cash and a stronger commitment, while a master power agreement or LOI is a framework that still requires individual contracts to be finalized as projects mature.
Early named deals included a roughly $25 million prepayment from data-center operator Equinix in April 2024 toward a future 20-year PPA for up to 500 MW, plus LOIs with Wyoming Hyperscale (later renamed Prometheus Hyperscale) for about 100 MW and with oil producer Diamondback Energy for about 50 MW in the Permian Basin. The largest headline deal came on December 18, 2024, when Oklo and data-center company Switch signed a non-binding master power agreement for up to 12 GW of capacity to be deployed through 2044, one of the largest corporate clean-power frameworks ever announced. Oklo's stated customer pipeline reached roughly 14 GW by 2025 and 2026, the bulk of it non-binding.
The most concrete recent agreement is with Meta. On January 5, 2026 Oklo entered a prepayment agreement with Meta Platforms to advance a 1.2 GW power campus in Pike County, Ohio, intended to supply Meta's data centers, with a first phase targeted as early as 2030 and full capacity by the mid-2030s. The Oklo agreement was part of a broader Meta push for up to 6.6 GW of nuclear power that also included deals with TerraPower and Vistra. Meta's prepayment structure gives it a mechanism to fund powerhouse deployment ahead of delivery, a stronger arrangement than the non-binding pipeline figures the company often cites.
| Customer | Capacity | Type | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Equinix | Up to 500 MW | ~$25M prepayment toward 20-yr PPA | April 2024 |
| Wyoming/Prometheus Hyperscale | ~100 MW | Non-binding LOI (20-yr PPA) | 2023 to 2024 |
| Diamondback Energy | ~50 MW | Non-binding LOI | 2024 |
| Switch | Up to 12 GW | Non-binding master power agreement | December 18, 2024 |
| Meta Platforms | Up to 1.2 GW (Pike County, OH) | Prepayment agreement | January 5, 2026 |
Beyond power, Oklo has expanded into nuclear fuel and radioisotopes. On February 28, 2025 it acquired Atomic Alchemy Inc., a radioisotope producer, for roughly $1.0 million in cash plus 820,840 shares of Class A common stock valued at about $27.4 million. Through Atomic Alchemy, Oklo is pursuing isotopes for medical, industrial, and defense uses. The Groves isotope test reactor carries a DOE target criticality date of July 4, 2026, and Oklo's Idaho Radiochemistry Laboratory received an NRC materials license that the company expects to generate its first revenue in 2026. Oklo also announced plans for a nuclear fuel recycling facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and is building the Aurora Fuel Fabrication Facility at INL to supply its own reactors. On January 7, 2026 the company signed a DOE Other Transaction Agreement to support a radioisotope pilot plant.
On the AI side, in April 2026 Oklo announced a collaboration with NVIDIA and Los Alamos National Laboratory to apply AI modeling, inference models, and digital twins to nuclear fuel research, with a focus on validating the plutonium-bearing fuels intended for Oklo's Pluto reactor. The companies framed the work as supporting "nuclear-powered AI factories" and tied it to the DOE's Genesis Mission, a federal AI-for-science initiative launched in November 2025. The collaboration is a research and computing partnership rather than an NVIDIA investment in Oklo. The episode underscores the feedback loop driving the company: AI's energy demand is both Oklo's target market and, increasingly, a tool in its own development.
Oklo is pre-revenue and loss-making, funding itself entirely through equity. The company reported operating expenses of $139.3 million for 2025 and a net loss of about $33.1 million for the first quarter of 2026 (roughly $0.18 to $0.19 per share), with a trailing-twelve-month net loss near $129 million as of mid-2026. Aggressive equity sales have left it unusually well capitalized for a development-stage company: Oklo raised about $1.2 billion through an at-the-market (ATM) equity program reported alongside its Q1 2026 results, and held roughly $2.5 billion in cash and marketable securities (about $2.6 billion in total liquidity) at March 31, 2026, against total stockholders' equity of about $2.64 billion. For 2026 the company guided to operating cash use of $80 million to $100 million plus capital spending of $350 million to $450 million as it builds out power, fuel, and isotope facilities.
The stock has been extraordinarily volatile. After debuting in May 2024 and trading near $21 in November 2024, OKLO surged through 2025 on AI-power enthusiasm to a 52-week high of $193.84 before pulling back to about $58 by early June 2026, leaving a market capitalization near $10 billion on roughly 174 million shares outstanding. The valuation rests on projected future capacity rather than any delivered megawatt-hours.
| Financial metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Revenue | None (pre-revenue) |
| 2025 operating expenses | $139.3 million |
| Q1 2026 net loss | ~$33.1 million |
| Cash and marketable securities (Mar 31, 2026) | ~$2.5 billion |
| Total stockholders' equity (Mar 31, 2026) | ~$2.64 billion |
| ATM equity raised (per Q1 2026 results) | ~$1.2 billion |
| 2026 capex guidance | $350 million to $450 million |
| Market cap (early June 2026) | ~$10 billion |
| 52-week share range | $44.88 to $193.84 |
Oklo is among the highest-profile bets on advanced nuclear, but it has drawn pointed skepticism. On November 20, 2024, short-seller Kerrisdale Capital published a report titled "Fission Impossible," calling Oklo a "story stock" with "no expected revenue for multiple years," no regulator-approved design, and no proven commercial viability. Kerrisdale said a former NRC commissioner it consulted believed Oklo's licensing timeline was "beyond optimistic" and would "probably take at least four years," that a former employee described senior management as "very inexperienced," and that the company used "outlandish" fuel-cost assumptions and had "lowballed" projections by a factor of five. Critics also note that sodium-cooled fast reactors have a long history of reliability and cost problems, and that Oklo does not yet have a secured long-term supply of HALEU fuel, which is expected to remain constrained well into the 2030s. Several plaintiffs' law firms announced investigations of the company in late 2024, and the English Wikipedia article on Oklo carried a promotional-content flag as of October 2025.
Supporters counter that Oklo has tangible advantages: a DOE site at Idaho National Laboratory, selection for the Reactor Pilot Program, a constructed-build partner in Kiewit, prepayment commitments from Equinix and Meta, and a balance sheet with billions in cash. The core open question, common to the whole advanced-reactor sector that includes peers such as X-energy and Kairos Power, is execution: whether Oklo can obtain an NRC license, build the first Aurora on budget and schedule, and convert a largely non-binding multi-gigawatt pipeline into operating plants that actually sell power. Until the first powerhouse reaches criticality, much of Oklo's value remains a projection.