US-based Aalo Atomics has closed a $100m Series B financing round, led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from new and existing investors. These include Fine Structure Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, Crosscut, NRG Energy, Vamos Ventures, Tishman Speyer, Kindred Ventures, 50Y, Harpoon Ventures, Crescent Enterprises, Alumni Ventures, MCJ, Gaingels, Perpetual VC, and Nucleation Capital, among others.
“We now have the capital to build our first nuclear power plant, the Aalo-X, which we’re aiming to bring to zero-power criticality next summer,” said CEO Matt Loszak. “This could be the first advanced nuclear power plant to turn on in the US in decades. This is not just a test reactor, but rather a full plant that will produce electricity.”
In December 2024, Aalo received approval from the US Department of Energy-Idaho Operations Office (DOE-ID) to pursue authorisation for the Aalo-X experimental reactor to be located at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). This experimental reactor is intended to pave the way for future commercial applications of the Aalo-1 reactor and help to refine and validate the technology. In May 2024, Aalo said it had completed the conceptual design of the Aalo-1 – a factory-fabricated 10 MWe sodium-cooled microreactor that uses uranium zirconium hydride (UZrH) fuel. However, there is very little on the Aalo website about the reactor technology.
Aalo also said it is planning to put an experimental data centre right next to the reactor. “This will be the first time a nuclear plant and data centre are built together and will act as a demonstration of something we’ll see a lot more of at GW scale thereafter,” Loszak said.
In April, Aalo announced the Aalo Pod – a 50 MWe extra modular reactor (XMR), purpose-built to provide scalable on-site power for modern data centres. The Aalo Pod is built around 50 MW modular blocks, easily scalable up to gigawatt levels with a compact footprint – 100 MW on less than five acres. Each standard Pod comprises five Aalo-1 reactors paired with a single power-generating turbine.
Aalo has an ambitious timeline. It began hiring 20 months ago. “In the past year, we finished the build-out of our 40,000 square-foot pilot factory, and our full-scale non-nuclear prototype. I highlight this timeline because we are very proud of our speed, Loszak said.
He detailed the company’s master plan:
- Build Aalo-X to prove product-market fit: speed, reliability, and economics for data centres. Then build thousands of Aalo Pods (five Aalo-1 reactors and one turbine per Pod), to power data centres at scale.
- Enter many more markets, e.g. municipal utilities, desalination, industrial process heat, and more. Data centres are only 1% of the power market globally, so there are a lot of other markets to go after.
- Our next reactor will be approximately 10 times more powerful, in a similar physical form-factor to the Aalo-1 (still with a focus on mass manufacturability and road transportability). This will bring down the cost of electricity further, approaching the goal of 3 cents/kWh.
