Oklo and X-Energy are set to join a $200 million federal program championed by the Trump administration to fast-track the development of advanced nuclear reactors designed to power artificial intelligence data centers. The news, first reported by Bloomberg based on an internal Department of Energy document, sent shares of both advanced reactor developers sharply higher in after-hours trading: X-Energy surged as much as 12%, while Oklo climbed 9.9%.
The program builds on an existing initiative that already counts Microsoft and Nvidia among its participants. Of the total $200 million, $60 million will be distributed over three years across several DOE national laboratories and academic institutions, including the University of Texas at Austin. An official announcement could come as early as Wednesday, at an AI energy summit convened by the DOE. The program’s stated goals are concrete: significantly cut the time required to design, license, and build new nuclear plants, and reduce the number of operators needed to run them.
Compared to other capital-intensive federal programs — such as the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, which involves roughly $3.2 billion in cost-sharing commitments for TerraPower’s Natrium reactor and X-Energy’s Xe-100 — this new $200 million investment targets a different bottleneck. The approach leverages AI itself, partnerships with federal laboratories, and private industry to compress the bureaucratic and engineering timelines that currently stand between reactor projects and energy-hungry data centers. It represents a strategic shift: fewer direct construction subsidies, and more tools to clear procedural roadblocks.
The timing is no coincidence. Data center expansion driven by the AI boom is pushing electricity prices higher across the country, and companies like OpenAI and Nvidia have identified energy availability as one of the primary constraints on domestic AI growth. Nuclear power addresses this demand with a quality renewables cannot match: continuous baseload power, available around the clock, with no direct carbon emissions. The Department of Energy projects that 300 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity will be needed by 2050 to keep pace with demand. The United States currently has no large commercial reactors under construction, while China has 39 active construction sites.
For Oklo, this program adds to a string of milestones over the past year: the company had already been selected for three projects under the DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program and, subsequently, for the Fuel Line Pilot Projects aimed at building advanced fuel fabrication facilities. X-Energy, for its part, already holds a federal commitment for the demonstration of its Xe-100 reactor. If the $200 million program delivers on its promised reductions in licensing and construction timelines, it could become the blueprint for the next phase of America’s nuclear resurgence — and Wall Street, at least for now, appears to believe it will.
