On a hot July day, Jacob DeWitte entered a Starbucks in Washington. His hair was frizzy, his suit had a few wrinkles, and he had been traversing the city from TV appearances to business meetings in 94-degree heat.
DeWitte is the CEO of Oklo, a Santa Clara, California-based advanced nuclear power startup he founded in 2013 alongside his wife Caroline, the company’s chief operating officer. He had returned to the capital to build on Oklo’s good fortune — to capitalize on the work of its growing roster of lobbyists and a wave of nuclear optimism in Washington and on Wall Street.
Oklo’s share price climbed 50 percent in July — the start of a meteoric rise that surpassed $142 on Tuesday — lifting off like a tech stock rather than one tethered to the vagaries of energy markets and supply chains.
Oklo’s detractors say its stock run-up is magical thinking, supported by flimsy cost projections and limited appreciation for the historical challenges of building nuclear power plants.
Still, Oklo’s success is hard to separate from its proximity to political power and the moment we’re in. DeWitte’s return to Washington in July came weeks after he stood in the Oval Office next to President Donald Trump as he signed four executive orders that put the nuclear industry on a faster track. The orders called for speedier testing and licensing of new reactors like the one Oklo has designed.
DeWitte hadn’t sought out the invitation from the White House in May, he recalls, but he jumped at it.
“I was like, ‘Yeah, sure,’” DeWitte said. “We didn’t know many of the details. There wasn’t, like, a big finagling.”
Of the 37 advanced reactor designers looking to operate in the United States, DeWitte was the only chief executive speaking that day in the Oval Office.
The opportunity built on DeWitte’s strategy: to ensure the company had strong connections at the federal level and that it was aligned with the White House’s pursuit of a faster, more streamlined process for bringing nuclear technology online.
The company has a political pedigree that’s nearly unmatched for the Trump era. It has financial backing from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who served as Oklo board chair until April and who joins the Big Tech heavyweights shaping the president’s approach to artificial intelligence. Altman has promoted the idea that the only way to beat China to the most advanced AI models is to build gargantuan data centers that require around-the-clock electricity — a nod to nuclear.
In addition, Energy Secretary Chris Wright also had a seat on Oklo’s board of directors when Trump nominated him to his Cabinet.
Perhaps Oklo’s biggest coup has been its success in hooking retail investors — even before Oklo has built a single reactor. After Trump’s inauguration, the share price jumped, fell and then skyrocketed — up about 570 percent at the start of this week.
Wedbush Securities senior equities analyst Dan Ives — whom Vanity Fair called “Wall Street’s most tireless optimist” — published a note Sunday that valued Oklo at $150 a share. Ives predicts a three-to-five-year bull market for AI tech stocks, and that optimism extends to nuclear power. “Oklo remains one of the main beneficiaries of the significantly increased U.S. government support for nuclear energy that is prioritizing speed,” Ives wrote.
On Monday, traders lifted the stock to $140 (it had been at $100 the previous Thursday) as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and other federal officials were on hand for Oklo’s groundbreaking for its Aurora reactor project at the Idaho National Laboratory.
Oklo is preparing to again seek a federal license for its small modular reactor design, almost four years after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied its original application. In the meantime, Oklo has primed investor confidence. In August, it was selected for three projects under DOE’s Reactor Pilot Program. The company was tentatively selected in June to provide power for Alaska’s Eielson Air Force Base.
Oklo in December also signed a nonbinding agreement with data center developer Switch to supply up to 12 gigawatts of nuclear power for data centers.
Opening doors to the Oval Office
OpenAI, Google and Amazon are, in one form or another, partnering with nuclear companies.
The spending craze around AI doesn’t appear to be easing. Altman’s OpenAI this week announced a $100 billion partnership with chipmaker Nvidia to build the equivalent of 10 gigawatts’ worth of computing power — the rough equivalent of 10 large nuclear stations.
To DeWitte, the proliferation of generative AI models went hand-in-hand with Oklo’s goals.
“If you think about what starts in 2024 — maybe in the first half of it, but started to scale in the latter half of it — was the recognition of AI being real, being here, and is going to need a lot of power,” DeWitte said.
Sensing the opportunity, Oklo increased its lobbying spending in Q4 2024. With a new White House and Congress elected, it doubled down on the spending in the first quarter of 2025. That quarter, the company spent $424,000 on lobbying, more than it did in all of 2024. It employed 14 lobbyists, up from four the year before.
For comparison, competitor NuScale Power, one of the only other publicly traded advanced reactor developers, spent just $50,000 with two lobbyists in the first quarter of 2025.
Oklo pushed for nuclear permitting reform, government assistance in developing a fuel supply chain and preserving tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act.
Financial analysts and industry observers say the political spending and connections to Altman and top administration officials are adding to Oklo’s allure.
“The fact that Jacob DeWitte was in the Oval Office with the president, despite the fact that Oklo has never built anything, really took people as, ‘Wow! All the money they’ve thrown into the political system has helped,’” said a Washington-based policy adviser to advanced reactor developers who requested anonymity to speak more freely about a specific company.
Oklo is viewed as a Republican-aligned company. And criticism of its close ties to the secretary of Energy have been relatively muted. But in a letter to Trump on Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts raised conflict of interest issues around Oklo’s plan to build a fuel reprocessing plant in Tennessee.
“I am concerned that your Administration is moving forward with plans to transfer plutonium to Oklo and allow it to build a reprocessing plant not because these proposals make sense for the United States, but because Oklo stands to benefit financially and Secretary Wright is acting in his former company’s interest,” Markey wrote.
DeWitte said Oklo isn’t hitching its wagon to any political party, noting that he eagerly attended events hosted by the Obama and Biden administrations, too.
Eric Stine, an analyst at Craig-Hallum, says the fact that it trades as a public stock and has a rising profile explains much of its success on Wall Street.
“There’s scarcity [of] public advanced reactor companies, and it certainly is one of — if not the most — high-profile,” Stine said, highlighting Oklo’s connections to Altman and Wright alongside DeWitte’s frequent appearances on CNBC and Fox News.
Citigroup analyst Vikram Bagri echoed Stine’s comment. “The retail participation in these stocks is elevated,” Bagri added. “These stocks trade more on news flow and sentiment than fundamentals.”
Wright: ‘Right technology’ and ‘right business model’
In 2022, now-Secretary Wright was the CEO of the oil company Liberty Energy. Liberty wanted to invest in other energy sources. Nuclear hit the mark: It could be scaled up, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs had started companies to develop nuclear, and it was seen as reliable energy for big, industrial operations.
Wright believed small modular reactors had a future. SMRs, like Oklo’s nuclear design, are small, factory-assembled reactors that can be stacked to scale up energy output. They haven’t been commercially deployed yet in the United States.
“I did a survey of all the small modular reactor companies,” Wright said at a 2024 energy investment conference. The “runaway winner,” he told the Denver audience, was Oklo.
“Right technology — which is fast-neutron, metal-cooled — and the right business model,” Wright elaborated. “Get through the NRC and then build and own the plant yourself and sell power purchase agreements.”
Oklo’s latest Aurora small reactor design, which now offers a 75-megawatt capacity (increased from 50 MW), calls for liquid sodium as a coolant instead of the water used in conventional power plants. With a high boiling point, liquid sodium theoretically minimizes the high-pressure risks that led to the Chernobyl disaster.
The fundamentals of “fast reactors” like Oklo’s have been tested at labs across the globe. Supporters of the technology say it reduces waste, has higher thermodynamic efficiency, and has the ability to be passively cooled. One notable competitor, Bill Gates-backed TerraPower, also favors the technology.
Liberty invested in Oklo in 2023, and Wright joined the board of directors in May 2024. But the bet on Oklo had detractors. The NRC had just rejected Oklo’s reactor design application.
Allison Macfarlane, a former NRC chair, underscored the rarity of the move. She says applications often face delays or withdrawals. “A recent exception to that was Oklo, where they were actually out-and-out rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That usually doesn’t happen.” Macfarlane said.
“If you read the NRC’s documents on this, they were clearly extremely frustrated by Oklo just ignoring them,” Macfarlane said. “They asked questions over and over. They never got answers.”
DeWitte attributed the licensing derailment to the pandemic, which upended the process the NRC was piloting with Oklo. The NRC was reviewing Oklo’s application under an open office plan with staff across different subject matters dynamically reviewing the design simultaneously.
“All that in-person stuff changed,” DeWitte said. “Their team wasn’t functioning as well. It was harder for us to communicate as well.”
‘Oklo’s valuation is not optimistic’
But as it prepares to make a second go at an NRC license, some people tracking the company say they’re concerned about the information Oklo’s given investors.
POLITICO’s E&E News spoke with eight financial analysts and industry experts about fuel cost projections Oklo has made public to investors. The analysts and experts all characterized Oklo’s timeline predictions and cost estimates as somewhere between overly optimistic and absurd, and some criticized Oklo’s reactor technology.
“Theranos unavoidably comes to mind,” Chris Keefer, president of Canadians for Nuclear Energy, wrote on Monday. The nonprofit group supports nuclear power as a climate-friendly source of energy.
“Oklo’s valuation is not optimistic, it is preposterous. What goes up must come down & when it does, the reputation of the nuclear industry will [too],” Keefer wrote.
“Zero revenue. No NRC design certification,” he added. “Now the company has pivoted to a 75 MWe sodium fast reactor … with even more daunting technical & regulatory hurdles.”
The basic technology behind Aurora has a rocky history. To date, fast reactors have often encountered operational problems and, sometimes, serious accidents, often owing to the sodium coolant burning if exposed to air.
Russia’s BN-600 — one of only two commercial fast reactors — has operated for 45 years. It suffered 14 sodium fires in its first 17 years of operations, but had no sodium leaks between 1995 and 2017.
Then there’s fuel.
High-assay, low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, is the feedstock to fabricate fuel for Oklo’s Aurora reactor design and many other advanced reactor designs. But HALEU is currently only commercially produced in Russia, and Russian uranium imports are being phased out in the U.S. by an act of Congress.
In filings with the SEC that Oklo submitted between September 2023 and April 2024, it based their financial projections on acquiring “newly fabricated HALEU purchased from a third-party supplier at a cost of $7,000 per kg.”
That’s much lower than most current market estimates.
“$7,000/kg of HALEU does not align with our most recent cost model and technical analysis,” Erik Cothron, a senior analyst at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, said in an interview. “We estimated roughly $25,000/kg of HALEU in December 2023, and since then, the price of uranium has increased. So I would expect the cost of HALEU to be even higher than our initial estimate.”
DeWitte says Oklo’s cost estimate for fuel is based on figures he got from enrichment companies promising more cost-effective processing. He said Oklo plans to update the numbers soon, adding that the company estimates recycled fuel from its planned Tennessee facility will start out costing less than $7,000/kg, and come down to under $2,000 when fully scaled.
But higher fuel and construction costs could cut into Oklo’s profitability.
Could fuel costs cut profits?
The Oklo filings’ financial figures on capital expenditures and revenue from power sales suggest its old 50-MW reactor would have paid for its total lifetime costs in 11 or 12 years.
Analysts at the Nuclear Innovation Alliance and Third Way peg the current market value of HALEU at between three and five times higher than Oklo’s cost estimate. If all of its other financial projections are true and initial fuel-load and refueling costs are substituted with current market estimates for HALEU, it could nearly double the time a operating reactor needs to turn a profit — to at least 22 years.
Analysts say Oklo’s bump-up to a larger reactor design could help the company leverage economies of scale. But an estimated construction cost starting at $86 million doesn’t match up with DOE estimates.
In 2023, DOE estimated the construction cost for a first-of-a-kind nuclear project at $6,000 to $10,000 per kilowatt, with costs coming down as more are built. Applying this to Oklo’s old 50-MW reactor, the total first-of-a-kind build cost would be expected to range between $300 million and $500 million. Costs are expected to come down as more are built.
DeWitte responds that nuclear costs are inflated by exorbitant markups on materials classified as related to nuclear safety.
A 2020 report out of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that nuclear-grade components are significantly more expensive “mainly because of the additional qualification tests, quality assurance requirements and documentation necessary to gain nuclear-grade certification.”
“[By] reducing the number of components that require some kind of safety classification,” DeWitte said, Oklo can make nuclear construction affordable. Oklo aiming to bring its first reactor online as soon as late 2027.
Trump has ordered the NRC to reassess its safety standards, but it remains to be seen how or if safety classification rules are revised.
In his blog post, Keefer predicted that a sodium fast reactor will take a lot longer than two years. He cited the last time the U.S. tried to do it: the Experimental Breeder Reactor II test reactor at the Idaho National Lab. It shut down in 1994.
Stine, the analyst at Craig-Hallum, says Oklo has good odds of building at least one reactor, though long-term success is difficult to predict.
Still, Oklo’s $20 billion valuation is higher than BWXT, a major nuclear company that already supplies nuclear reactors, fuel and components for the Navy and commercially furnishes medical isotopes and nuclear services.
“You’re basically assuming that 25 of those reactors have already been built and are in the stock,” said Bagri of Citigroup, “which gives us an impression how far the market has gone in placing their trust.”
