One nuclear fuel supply deal sent uranium stocks up more than 10% in a single day. Oklo — the small modular reactor startup backed by Sam Altman — signed a multi-year agreement with Centrus, the only U.S. company currently producing HALEU,* the specialized fuel that next-generation reactors require. The market reaction was instant. The story goes deeper than one contract.
The AI power problem is real. A single large data center now consumes as much electricity as a small city. The biggest tech companies are building dozens of them simultaneously. Solar and wind can’t meet that demand — they don’t run continuously. Connecting to the power grid takes years of permitting and waiting. That leaves one practical option for carbon-free, around-the-clock power that can be built directly beside a data center: SMRs,* or small modular reactors. We’ve covered why Big Tech made that turn toward nuclear in the first place — what’s new here is the fuel.
But building the reactor is only one piece of the problem.
HALEU — High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium — is the fuel these reactors need, and until recently, almost all of it came from Russia and China. As that supply chain became untenable, the U.S. moved to build domestic production. The Department of Energy committed $2.7 billion over ten years, with a separate $900 million task order for Centrus specifically. Oklo’s agreement is one of the first major private contracts to flow from that infrastructure.
Here’s what investors are slowly realizing: the AI buildout isn’t one supply chain problem. It’s a stack of them. You need the data center. You need the power. You need the reactor. You need the fuel. You need the enrichment capacity. You need the uranium. Each layer solved reveals another layer underneath. The companies sitting at each new bottleneck tend to attract capital very quickly — Centrus gained 12% the day the Oklo deal was announced, on the back of a single letter of intent. That’s how fast money moves when a new constraint is identified.
GPUs were the first constraint. Power became the second. Fuel is becoming the third.
My take: It’s turtles all the way down.
Not advice. Just how I see it.