Oklo Inc.

Overview

Oklo Inc. designs and intends to build, own, and operate small advanced fission power plants, which it calls Aurora powerhouses, then sell the electricity under long-term contracts. It is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and was founded in 2013 by Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran. The name comes from the Oklo site in Gabon, where natural nuclear fission occurred in uranium deposits about 1.7 billion years ago.

Oklo went public in May 2024 by merging with AltC Acquisition Corp, a special-purpose acquisition company co-founded and chaired by Sam Altman.

The company is pre-revenue with no operating reactor. Its prominence rests on two things: a large but mostly non-binding pipeline of data-center power agreements, and a high, volatile stock valuation, set against a first commercial reactor now under construction at Idaho National Laboratory. Nothing in that pipeline generates cash today, and no Oklo reactor has been built or operated.

The technology

The Aurora powerhouse is a sodium-cooled fast reactor using metallic fuel. Its design descends from the Experimental Breeder Reactor II, a sodium-cooled fast reactor that ran at Idaho National Laboratory from 1964 to 1994. Aurora uses metallic high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel and is designed to run on fresh HALEU or on recycled used nuclear fuel.

A fast reactor differs from the light-water reactors and light-water small modular reactors most competitors are building. It has no water moderator to slow the neutrons, it can consume used nuclear fuel rather than only fresh fuel, it operates at microreactor scale, and it is designed for long intervals between refueling. Those features set Aurora apart technically from the SMR field.

The targeted output has changed several times. Oklo introduced Aurora as a 1.5 megawatt-electric microreactor in its original 2020 license application, later scaled the design to 15 MWe, and now describes the first unit as up to 75 MWe. Larger configurations appear in its data-center plans.

Oklo describes Aurora as relying on inherent and passive safety. Read those as company design claims for a reactor that has not been built or operated, not as demonstrated performance.

Business model

Oklo's model is unusual for nuclear. It is a build-own-operate developer and independent power producer. Rather than selling reactors to utilities, it intends to build, own, and operate its powerhouses itself and sell the electricity, and in some cases heat, under long-term power purchase agreements.

The structure is designed for recurring revenue once plants run. It also means Oklo carries the construction, financing, and operating risk itself rather than handing it to a utility buyer, which is a central reason the company is capital-intensive and burning cash years before any revenue arrives.

Customer pipeline

Oklo reports a customer pipeline of roughly 14 gigawatts. Almost none of it is contracted. The pipeline is dominated by non-binding agreements: letters of intent, memoranda of understanding, and non-binding framework deals. It is a pipeline of intentions rather than orders, and it generates essentially no cash today.

Two anchors dominate, both non-binding frameworks rather than binding PPAs. The first is a roughly 12 GW non-binding Master Power Agreement with data-center developer Switch, announced December 18, 2024, to deploy over about 20 years through 2044. Both companies described it as a framework expected to convert into individual binding agreements only as project milestones are met, with initial deployments possibly beginning around 2029.

The second is a Prepayment Agreement with Meta Platforms, signed January 5, 2026, to develop a roughly 1.2 GW power campus in Pike County, Ohio serving Meta's data centers. Meta prepays for power and helps fund powerhouse deployment. Like the Switch arrangement, it is a non-binding prepayment framework, not a binding PPA.

The other named items are smaller and similarly preliminary: a roughly 500 MW letter of intent with data-center operator Equinix, backed by a roughly $25 million prepayment that sits on the balance sheet as a right-of-first-refusal liability rather than revenue; a roughly 100 MW, 20-year PPA letter of intent with Prometheus Hyperscale; and up to roughly 750 MW of additional data-center LOIs.

Separately, Oklo has a U.S. defense arrangement. In June 2025 the Air Force issued a notice of intent for Oklo to build and operate a 5 MWe microreactor at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, under a 30-year PPA, contingent on Oklo obtaining an NRC license. A similar 2023 notice involving Oklo had been rescinded.

One clarification on counting. Siemens, Vertiv, and Liberty Energy are development and collaboration partners, not power-purchase customers, and should not be counted in the pipeline. The same applies to an April 2026 collaboration with NVIDIA and Los Alamos National Laboratory on AI-enabled reactor R&D and plutonium-bearing fuels: a research partnership, not a power contract. The roughly 14 GW figure is a pipeline of stated intentions, not contracted capacity or booked revenue.

Fuel recycling and isotopes

Oklo is pursuing two adjacent lines, both early-stage and pre-commercial. The first is fuel recycling: it announced in 2025 a planned facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, described as the first phase of an advanced fuel center of up to $1.68 billion. The company calls it the first privately funded U.S. nuclear fuel-recycling facility and targets fuel production from the early 2030s.

The second is radioisotopes. Through a roughly $25 million all-stock acquisition of Atomic Alchemy, closed in February 2025, Oklo plans an isotope test reactor, the Groves Isotopes Test Reactor, in Caldwell County, Texas. Groves has advanced quickly under the Department of Energy's Reactor Pilot Program: on July 1, 2026 the DOE approved its Documented Safety Analysis, and Oklo is targeting first criticality in 2026. First criticality is a startup milestone rather than commercial output, and routine isotope production and the Oak Ridge facility remain years away.

Regulatory status & deployment

The regulatory arc needs stating precisely. The NRC denied Oklo's original combined license application for the 1.5 MWe Aurora on January 6, 2022. The denial was without prejudice and cited insufficient information. The NRC made no safety findings, meaning it neither approved nor rejected the reactor on safety grounds; it found the application incomplete.

Oklo re-engaged. On May 6, 2026 the NRC approved its Aurora Principal Design Criteria topical report, a framework step that can be referenced in future applications. It is not a construction permit and not an operating license. Oklo has also reapplied, completing an NRC pre-application readiness assessment for the first phase of a new Aurora-INL license in July 2025 with no significant gaps identified, and has since submitted a new custom combined license application, which it describes as the first custom combined license application for an advanced fission reactor. That application is before the NRC, and no licensing decision has been made.

On deployment, Oklo broke ground on the first commercial Aurora at Idaho National Laboratory on September 22, 2025, with Kiewit Nuclear Solutions as lead constructor. Construction proceeds on the DOE and INL site under Department of Energy authorities while the NRC license remains outstanding. Oklo and its subsidiary Atomic Alchemy were selected in 2025 for three projects under the DOE's Reactor Pilot Program, and on June 11, 2026 DOE Idaho approved the Aurora Powerhouse Nuclear Safety Design Agreement, the authority under which the INL build proceeds. The targeted first-power date is 2027. That date is ambitious and depends on NRC licensing, HALEU availability, and construction execution; some sources already point to 2028 or 2029.

On fuel, Oklo was allocated roughly 5 metric tons of HALEU recovered from the decommissioned EBR-II, downblended and still owned by the DOE. A commercial supply chain for HALEU or recycled fuel is only beginning to form: in June 2026 Oklo signed a non-binding letter of intent with Centrus Energy to buy domestic HALEU for up to five Aurora units, produced at Centrus's American Centrifuge Plant in Piketon, Ohio, with deliveries beginning in 2029. It is an intention rather than a delivery, and the supply chain remains years from serving a commercial reactor. As of mid-2026, no NRC license to build or operate the Aurora has been granted.

Financial position

Oklo has no revenue to date. For FY2025 it reported a GAAP operating loss of about $139.3 million. The net loss was smaller, about $105.7 million, because interest income on its large cash balance offset part of the operating loss. The two figures differ and should not be used interchangeably. Operating cash burn was about $82 million in FY2025. In the first quarter of 2026 the operating loss was about $51.2 million and the net loss about $33.1 million, with roughly $17.9 million of cash used in operations.

The company is funded by equity, not debt. At the end of 2025 it held about $1.4 billion in cash and marketable securities with no debt. It then completed, in the first quarter of 2026, a $1.5 billion at-the-market program launched in December 2025, which raised about $1.18 billion net. With that program and a roughly $442 million public offering in June 2025, cash and marketable securities reached about $2.5 billion at March 31, 2026, still with no debt. The trade-off is direct: ample runway, funded by repeated equity issuance that dilutes existing shareholders, with no revenue yet to offset the burn.

On valuation, as of early July 2026 Oklo's market value was roughly $9 billion on about 174 million shares, with a 52-week trading range of about $45 to $194 per share. That is a speculative valuation for a pre-revenue company, driven largely by the narrative around nuclear power for AI data centers. This is stated as fact with its date, not as a view on whether the stock is cheap or expensive.

Leadership & the SPAC lineage

Jake DeWitte is chief executive officer and co-founder. Caroline Cochran, the other co-founder, is chief operating officer.

Oklo went public through Sam Altman's AltC SPAC, and Altman chaired the board after the merger. He stepped down as chairman in April 2025 to remove a conflict of interest as Oklo pursued power deals with AI companies, including potentially OpenAI, which Altman runs. DeWitte then took the chair.

Chris Wright sat on Oklo's board before resigning to become U.S. Secretary of Energy, a post he was confirmed to in February 2025. The Department of Energy has said Wright resigned before taking office and never owned Oklo stock. Ethics-disclosure reporting indicated he had held unvested restricted stock units as a director. Both are stated positions.

Competitive position

Oklo competes in the advanced-nuclear and SMR development field, where peers take distinct technical and commercial approaches:

• NuScale Power builds a light-water SMR. Its 50 MWe design received NRC design certification effective 2023, and its uprated 77 MWe module received a Standard Design Approval in 2025, a step short of full certification.
• X-energy is developing a high-temperature gas reactor and is backed by Amazon.
• TerraPower is building the Natrium reactor, a sodium-cooled fast reactor paired with thermal storage.
• Kairos Power is developing a salt-cooled reactor; it received an NRC construction permit in 2023 and has a Google offtake arrangement.
• Westinghouse is developing the eVinci microreactor.

Oklo's distinguishing features are a small fast microreactor, the build-own-operate model selling power rather than reactors, and its fuel-recycling ambition. On regulatory milestones, NuScale with design certification and Kairos with a construction permit have reached specific NRC steps Oklo has not matched, while Oklo has begun site construction at INL under DOE authorities. These are different milestones on different tracks, so the comparison is point by point rather than an overall ranking.

Strategy & outlook

Oklo's thesis is to meet rising data-center and AI power demand with a fast microreactor sold as electricity under long-term PPAs, vertically integrate into fuel recycling and isotopes, and convert its large non-binding pipeline into binding contracts as the first INL unit gets built and licensed. It pushed that integration further in 2026 by acquiring manufacturing and engineering firms to bring fabrication in-house: ARMEC, a precision manufacturer, closed June 4, 2026, and Creative Engineers, which specializes in the sodium and alkali-metal systems relevant to Aurora's coolant, on June 30, 2026.

The whole case depends on three things that are not yet proven: executing a first-of-a-kind reactor, securing an NRC license to build and operate it, and turning stated intentions into signed contracts. None has happened yet.

Key considerations

Oklo is pre-revenue with a speculative, volatile valuation. It has no operating reactor, and its roughly 14 GW pipeline is overwhelmingly non-binding: a set of LOIs, MOUs, and framework agreements that may or may not convert, not contracted revenue.

The reactor carries first-of-a-kind and licensing risk. The original license application was denied in 2022, nothing is yet licensed to build or operate, and the 2027 first-power target is ambitious. HALEU fuel is a structural dependency on a supply chain only beginning to form; the June 2026 Centrus letter of intent is a step toward domestic supply, and deliveries are not slated to begin until 2029, which adds schedule risk beyond Oklo's control.

The company is burning cash and funding it through continuing equity issuance. That gives a long runway with no debt, and it dilutes existing shareholders with each raise, with no revenue yet to offset the burn.

Governance and conflict-of-interest questions have drawn scrutiny, and these are attributed positions rather than findings. Senator Ed Markey and the Union of Concerned Scientists have raised concerns about federal support for Oklo given Energy Secretary Chris Wright's former board seat, and about plans to give private firms access to government nuclear material. In June 2026 Markey urged the administration to cancel a DOE plan to make roughly 20 metric tons of surplus weapons-usable plutonium available to private industry, with Oklo among the companies that could receive material. The Department of Energy has responded that Wright resigned before taking office and never owned Oklo stock. Both the concerns and the response are stated positions of the parties involved.

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