US nuclear startups reach criticality DOE July 4 deadline Valar Nvidia datacenter
Three US nuclear startups, Valar Atomics, Antares Energy and Deployable Energy, reached reactor criticality before the DOE's July 4 deadline. Valar hit 100 kW in Utah and signed Nvidia $NVDA to power an AI datacenter. Small reactors are now aimed straight at compute demand.
Three American nuclear startups reached a milestone this week that reshapes how the next wave of AI infrastructure could be powered. Valar Atomics, Antares Energy and Deployable Energy each brought a reactor to criticality ahead of the July 4 deadline the Department of Energy set through its Reactor Pilot Program, created by a May 2025 executive order. According to reporting from Forbes and confirmation from the Department of Energy, Valar's Ward250 unit, roughly the size of a minivan, generated 100 kilowatts at a test site in Utah on July 1, enough to run a single Nvidia $NVDA Blackwell processor. The company paired the demonstration with a deal to build a small nuclear-powered data center in Utah with Nvidia. The reason this matters right now is the collision between AI compute growth and the electric grid. Data centers are competing with households and industry for power and water, and grid interconnection queues stretch for years in many regions. Small modular reactors sited next to a data center offer operators a way around that bottleneck, generating dedicated power on site rather than waiting for transmission upgrades. Whether these first units can scale from kilowatts to the megawatts a real data center needs is the open question these tests were designed to probe.