“This project will create jobs, spur local innovation and strengthen America’s leadership in energy technology,” Urvi Parekh, head of global energy at Meta, said in a statement. “By investing in baseload nuclear power, we are helping build a resilient and sustainable future for our communities.”
It is not unusual for utilities to negotiate long-term contracts for reactor fuel. But this is the first known case in which a hyperscaler buys the fuel that will generate the electrons it plans to buy, says Koroush Shirvan, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“The Oklo model they advertise is that they build, own and operate it themselves,” says Shirvan. “But I’m trying to think of other fuel supply customers besides the U.S. government. I can’t think of any.”
Oklo emerged last year as the poster child for a possible U.S. revolution in how nuclear power plants are built. Until recently, the United States had not launched or completed a fresh reactor in a generation. Before the only fresh machines came online in 2023 and 2024 at the Southern Company plant in northern Georgia – a pair of 1,100-megawatt Westinghouse AP1000s, the leading established reactor design in the U.S. – the project was billions of dollars over budget and more than half a decade behind schedule. However, the second unit was approximately 30 percent cheaper than the first, demonstrating the efficiency achieved by repeating the same design.
To solve this problem, a growing faction in the nuclear industry has proposed reducing the size of reactors so that building a 1,000 MW plant would require building multiple reactors of the same size, ultimately lowering costs. Many of these companies, including NuScale Power and GE Vernova-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, have focused on building scaled-down versions of the water-cooled reactors that make up the entire 94-unit U.S. fleet. Instead, Oklo and competitors such as X-energy, Google-backed Kairos Power and Aalo Atomics, have sought a completely pristine slate, trying to commercialize experimental reactor models that employ coolants such as sodium, molten salt or high-temperature gas instead of water.
This type of project required a different type of fuel, such as HALEU, one that could burn more of the energy contained in uranium than established reactors. The problem was that the only commercial suppliers of HALEU were Russia and China. The Meta deal will enable Oklo to finance the production of fuel needed as enrichment companies race to build infrastructure to produce HALEU domestically.
The agreement solves a key challenge facing Oklo, but it is not the only one. The company has been a darling of retail investors since going public via a SPAC merger with a blank-check company in May 2024, and it grew to a market capitalization worth tens of billions of dollars last year as investors began betting on the future of nuclear-powered data centers. But Oklo has yet to generate any real revenue, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission filings demonstrate and did not resubmit his application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In October, an unnamed former NRC official who oversaw the latest approval attempt in 2022 said Bloomberg business that the company “is probably the worst candidate the NRC has ever had.” Oklo, in turn, sharply criticized the NRC for hindering fresh technologies and said he planned to resubmit the application soon.
Still, the Meta deal shows that “we’re finally getting to a point where we’re solving some of the fundamental problems,” said Chris Gadomski, chief nuclear analyst at consulting firm BloombergNEF.
“It’s about time,” he said. “Either way, this is a company worth keeping an eye on.”