Data centers have a power problem. Not the kind you solve with solar panels or a friendly utility. The kind where AI training clusters demand hundreds of megawatts of uninterrupted, carbon-free electricity in locations where the grid can barely keep up. Aalo Atomics thinks it has a solution: the Aalo Pod, a 50 MWe nuclear power plant designed specifically for compute infrastructure.
The Austin-based startup unveiled the Pod as its first commercial product, built around five of its Aalo-1 sodium-cooled microreactors feeding a single turbine. It occupies a deliberate middle ground. Microreactors, typically under 10 MW, are too small for hyperscale facilities. Small modular reactors, typically rated below 300 MWe according to the World Nuclear Association, often inherit the civil engineering complexity of their larger predecessors. The Pod tries to split the difference.
Factory Floor to Data Center
Aalo calls its approach "XMR" for "extra modular." Both the reactors and the balance of plant are designed for factory assembly in Austin, then shipped via standard trucks to the installation site. According to the company, an Aalo Pod can be delivered within 12 months of order placement, with additional pods taking just a few months each. That timeline, if achievable, would be remarkable for an industry where decade-long construction schedules are common.
The footprint is similarly compact. The company claims 100 MW of capacity can fit on fewer than five acres, a land efficiency that beats solar, wind, and conventional nuclear by a wide margin. Because the Aalo-1 uses liquid sodium as a coolant rather than water, the Pod requires no external water source. This opens siting options that water-cooled designs cannot access.
Reliability Through Redundancy
Data centers live or die by uptime. Aalo addresses this with an N+1 configuration: five reactors feeding one turbine means the plant can maintain full output even with one reactor offline for maintenance or refueling. The company projects 98% baseline reliability, configurable to 99.9% in optimized setups or 99.999% across multiple pods. Those numbers, if validated, would match or exceed grid power.
The design also supports fully independent operation from the grid, grid-parallel modes, or hybrid configurations. For data center operators facing lengthy interconnection queues or unreliable local utilities, behind-the-meter nuclear presents an alternative that does not depend on transmission infrastructure buildout.
The Path to Market
Aalo has raised more than $136 million to date, including a $100 million Series B led by Valor Equity Partners in August 2025. Investors include Hitachi Ventures, NRG Energy, Fine Structure Ventures, and Tishman Speyer.
The company is currently building its Aalo-X experimental reactor at Idaho National Laboratory, the first project selected under the Department of Energy's Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program. Aalo is targeting criticality by July 4, 2026. If it succeeds, the reactor would be the first new sodium-cooled design to operate in the United States in over four decades. CTO Yasir Arafat, who previously led INL's MARVEL microreactor program, is overseeing the technical development.
Commercial Pod deployment is planned for 2029. The company has signed a memorandum of understanding with Idaho Falls Power for seven Aalo-1 reactors totaling 75 MW and was selected as one of four partners to develop up to 1 GW of nuclear capacity at Texas A&M's RELLIS Campus.
Economics Remain the Open Question
Aalo's stated goal is electricity at 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, competitive with natural gas and utility-scale solar. The company has not published a timeline for reaching that target, and given the nuclear industry's regulatory complexity and history of cost overruns, skepticism is warranted. NuScale's canceled Idaho project saw cost estimates balloon from $3.6 billion to $9.3 billion before the plug was pulled.
Still, the growing appetite among hyperscalers for reliable, carbon-free power is real. If Aalo can prove its manufacturing model works at scale, the Pod could reshape how and where data centers get built.
