Aalo Atomics

Aalo Atomics is a nuclear energy company developing factory-produced, transportable nuclear power plants intended primarily to supply electricity to AI data centers. Its core product is the Aalo-1 reactor, a sodium thermal reactor rated at 30 MWt / 10 MWe using uranium dioxide ceramic fuel, designed within the constraint of being transportable by truck. Multiple Aalo-1 units are combined into the Aalo Pod, a 50 MWe configuration of five reactors and three turbines built from factory-produced modules shipped on standard roads, with a design target of installation in under one year.

The company frames nuclear for data centers around three attributes: deployment speed (hundreds of megawatts in 6 to 12 months), availability (fleet deployment with staggered refueling for high uptime), and siting flexibility (no body of water required, behind-the-meter or grid-connected). It presents a cost-reduction pathway in which factory repeatability moves levelized cost from roughly 12-15 cents per kWh, serving AI data centers, to 7-10 cents for small utility, desalination, industrial heat and military installations, and ultimately toward 3 cents per kWh for broad grid applications.

Aalo's demonstration program centers on Aalo-X, a critical test reactor fabricated in Austin, Texas and installed at Idaho National Laboratory. The company reports building the first new reactor facility at INL in fifty years in thirty-six days, assembling the Critical Test Reactor in under four weeks, and achieving criticality in July 2026. Its published roadmap calls for Aalo-X to power a co-located data center and for a regulatory application for the first commercial Aalo Pod in 2027, Pod installations and Gigawatt Factory production-line ramp in 2028, and full-power Pod operation electrifying data centers at hundred-megawatt scale in 2029.

Business model

Aalo is vertically integrated, manufacturing reactor vessels, scaffolding modules, fuel assemblies and control systems in-house, with roughly 10% of content sourced from a network of 127 U.S. suppliers. The stated thesis is that vertical integration provides control over cost and schedule while mass manufacturing reduces unit cost with scale, supporting sale or deployment of standardized reactor units and Pods to power customers.

The company targets electricity delivery at defined cost tiers by kilowatt-hour, initially at 12-15 c/kWh for AI data centers, then 7-10 c/kWh for small utility, desalination, industrial heat and military installations, and 3 c/kWh for general grid markets.

Traction

The company reports growth from 2 to about 200 people in three years, more than $300M raised, a fully operational 40,000 sqft pilot factory in Austin that was completed and NQA-1 certified in six months, a completed full-scale prototype, sodium testing, Aalo-X fuel fabrication, and first criticality of the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor in July 2026. It states the reactor facility at Idaho National Laboratory was built in thirty-six days and that these results were achieved with under $100M in spend in under three years.

Latest developments

In May 2026, DOE-Idaho approved Aalo's Documented Safety Analysis for the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor. Aalo announced it achieved criticality in July 2026, and later that month announced a strategic partnership with Crusoe. Press coverage in July 2026 discussed Aalo among nuclear startups reaching reactor milestones and the U.S. advanced reactor race.