Sam Altman-Backed Oklo Signs Deal To Power Another Data Center

Sam Altman backed nuclear startup Oklo inked a deal to supply 100MW of nuclear power to data center company Wyoming Hyperscale, it was announced last week.

The news sent shares of NYSE-listed Oklo up more than 30% in trading on Friday. 

The companies signed a "non-binding letter of intent outlining plans for the PPA, which will last for 10 years," according to industry publication Data Center Dynamics. This comes on top of the revelation that, last month, Oklo signed to supply up to 500MW of power to another data center, Equinix. 

"Wyoming Hyperscale is building a data center campus on 58 acres of land," the report says. 

Jacob DeWitte, co-founder and CEO of Oklo, commented: “As the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence increases, Oklo remains dedicated to providing clean, reliable, and affordable energy solutions to meet the needs of our data center partners.”

“Our partnership with Wyoming Hyperscale underscores our commitment to advancing sustainable energy practices and supporting high-efficiency operations within the data center industry.”

Trenton Thornock, founder of Wyoming Hyperscale, added: "Our goal is to create data centers with minimal environmental impact. This collaboration with Oklo perfectly aligns with our vision for sustainable, efficient operations. By merging sustainability with advanced technology, we are setting a new standard for the future of accelerated computing.”

As we wrote earlier this month, Oklo won shareholder approval on May 8 for its NYSE listing. The company's mission is "to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy on a global scale through the design and deployment of next-generation fast reactor technology".

Backed by investors like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Peter Thiel, the who's who of the AI revolution, nuclear fusion startups are gaining traction. Sam Altman, who invested in Oklo in 2015, believes the company is "best positioned to commercialize advanced fission energy solutions," per a July press release.

Last month, we published a lengthy report discussing why even as the AI trade may be fizzling, the "electrification" trade, aka the "Power-Up America" trade - so urgently needed to run all those electricity-gobbling data centers needed to run AI - is just getting started and has in fact outperformed substantially both the broader AI and Data-Center Equipment baskets over the past two months...

... and Altman - who teamed up with another power company, Exowatt, earlier this year to focus on clean energy for AI power -agrees: "Fundamentally today in the world, the two limiting commodities you see everywhere are intelligence, which we're trying to work on with AI, and energy," Altman told CNBC in 2021. 

For those who missed it, in "The Next AI Trade," we outlined various investment opportunities for powering up America, most of which have dramatically outperformed the market. In the next iteration, we will likely add Oklo to the list of beneficiaries certainly ahead of the inevitable cascade of Buy ratings sure flood the name over the next month.