Big Tech has been going nuclear over its AI data centers, turning to energy startups to build nuclear reactors to meet the energy demands of artificial intelligence. This ranges from Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), and Alphabet’s Google (GOOG, GOOGL) recent agreements with providers.
Canaccord Genuity Managing Director George Gianarikas joins Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton for a conversation about investing in nuclear energy adoption, starting with stocks like small modular reactor designer NuScale Power (SMR) and uranium materials company ASP Isotopes (ASPI).
“There are the utilities (XLU) which are investing directly in the reactors and signing the power purchase agreements with some of the large hyperscalers. But those are more indirect ways to invest in the trend,” Gianarikas tells Yahoo Finance, claiming that the US energy grid “isn’t ready to deal with” surges in electricity consumption for AI.
“For some of the private companies, they actually have to get something called NRC — US Nuclear Regulatory Commission — approval to actually build those reactor designs. The one company that we do cover, Nuscale ticker symbol SMR, actually has that very approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” Gianarikas says.
He goes on to explain the vitality of uranium enrichment to this process, which is where ASP Isotopes comes in: “They’re taking that feedstock from the miners and then enriching it, isolating the isotope that’s needed for a fission reaction and then selling that to the reactor company. So there’s an entire food chain here that’s really important to make all this stuff happen.”
Kairos Power Co-Founder and CEO Mike Laufer sat down with Yahoo Finance earlier this week to elaborate on the energy startup’s agreement with Google to build out small modular reactors.
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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.