3 nuclear stocks poised to ride AI data center boom — one up 150% YTD

For investors, the nuclear surge isn't just another sector rotation — it's a direct play on AI infrastructure. With nuclear energy stocks handily outperforming the broader energy sector, the question is whether the partnerships with Equinix, Switch, and Meta can translate into revenue before regulatory and execution risks deflate the optimism.

A powerful convergence of trends is propelling nuclear energy stocks into the spotlight. After years of stagnation, the sector is surging — handily outperforming the broader energy market — as the relentless demand for power from artificial intelligence and cloud computing finds its match in nuclear’s unique ability to deliver clean, uninterrupted electricity 24/7. The latest spark: a flurry of high-profile partnerships between advanced reactor developers and the world’s largest data center operators, signaling a structural shift in how critical digital infrastructure will be powered. This briefing dissects the investment landscape, examining three nuclear upstarts — Oklo, Nano Nuclear Energy, and NuScale Power — each betting on a different slice of the small modular reactor (SMR) revolution.

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Oklo, a fast-fission reactor company backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has signed agreements with Equinix, Switch, and Meta Platforms to supply power to future data centers.

Nuclear’s revival is rooted in the surging power appetite of AI training clusters and hyperscale data centers. A single large AI training run can consume as much electricity as a small city, and unlike wind or solar, nuclear provides the consistent baseload that data centers demand. This has pushed Silicon Valley’s heaviest hitters to actively court reactor builders. Oklo, a fast-fission reactor company backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has signed agreements with Equinix, Switch, and Meta Platforms to supply power to future data centers. While no electricity is flowing yet — Oklo still needs NRC approval to deploy its commercial units and hasn’t proven large-scale operations — the partnerships underline a strategic realignment: tech giants are no longer passive grid consumers; they are becoming energy offtakers willing to invest in generation at the source.

Nano Nuclear Energy is taking an even nimbler approach, designing microreactors small enough for portable or space-based applications. One of its concepts targets deployment beyond Earth, highlighting the extreme versatility of next-gen nuclear. Like Oklo, Nano is pre-revenue and dancing with the same regulatory gauntlet, but its IP portfolio differentiates it from bigger peers. NuScale Power, meanwhile, holds a unique advantage: it is the only U.S. company with a NRC-approved SMR design — a standard 50-megawatt module that has already cleared the federal safety review. That moat is significant, because securing certification for a new reactor design can take a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars. NuScale’s first project, the Carbon Free Power Project, was canceled in 2023 due to cost increases, but the approval remains a valuable asset that could be leveraged through licensing deals or new partnerships.

The market is pricing in massive growth. Nuclear energy stocks have not only outperformed the broader energy sector over the past year, but have also become favored bets for investors seeking exposure to the AI megatrend without the pricier valuations of chipmakers. The thesis is straightforward: the more compute the world needs, the more power it must generate, and nuclear is the only scalable, zero-emission source that can meet round-the-clock demand. Yet the execution risks are daunting. Building new reactors, even small ones, remains capital-intensive, technologically complex, and subject to shifting public sentiment. Delays, cost overruns, and regulatory setbacks are the norm, not the exception, in the nuclear industry’s recent history.