Aalo Atomics
One Austin-based startup may have the answer to a crucial problem that the AI industry is still stuck on: how to power it all.
Aalo Atomics says the answer isn't the hulking nuclear plants of decades past. Instead, it's betting on mass-manufactured smaller reactors built to sit beside the data centers they'll fuel.
That pitch earned the company a hefty check. Aalo recently closed a $100 million Series B, CEO Matt Loszak told Business Insider. Valor Equity Partners led the round, and Harpoon Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and others participated, bringing Aalo's total funding to north of $136 million.
The startup's trajectory shows just how tightly AI and energy are now linked. Aalo CEO Matt Loszak said he cofounded the startup "hand-in-hand" with the AI boom.
"When we started the company, we had data centers high up on our list," he told Business Insider. "Very rapidly, we were like, 'OK, we have to focus the entire company around this.'"
Loszak and Yasir Arafat, the company's chief technology officer, founded Aalo in 2023 to make mass-manufactured nuclear power plants. The company's main product is the Aalo Pod, a small modular reactor built to power data centers. Aalo says one Pod can power roughly 50,000 homes, or one data center, Loszak said.
"Nuclear really is the ultimate underdog," Loszak said. He called it "the most misunderstood technology I've ever seen in my life," citing skepticism of the safety of nuclear power.
In August, the Department of Energy selected Aalo to test the company's experimental power plant Aalo-X, which it plans to complete construction for in 2026, at Idaho National Laboratory under the Trump administration's Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program. This program aims to speed up testing of advanced reactor designs and authorize deployment at sites beyond national labs.
Aalo isn't the only company getting a boost from Washington. Ten nuclear companies—including Antares Nuclear, Radiant Industries, Valar Atomics, and Sam Altman-backed Oklo—have been tapped for the DOE's initiative.
Big Tech companies have also increasingly become interested in leveraging nuclear power to fuel AI ambitions.
Aalo aims to eventually take its factory-built model global. In the future, Aalo hopes to mass-produce reactors in large facilities like its 40,000 square-foot Austin factory, ship them to sites around the world, and assemble them on location. Over time, Loszak said, the company hopes to work with a network of partner developers who would handle installation and operation of the Aalo Pods.
For now, the company hopes to partner with customers "willing to pay a premium because they value the speed," Loszak said, namely, cloud giants with data center projects in the works. The company declined to disclose which hyperscalers it's working with.
Aalo also plans to eventually "bring costs as low as possible to help bring more energy to everyone," Loszak said. Ultimately, it aims to cut energy costs to around three cents per kilowatt hour, though Aalo's prices are currently higher than this, Loszak said. Energy costs can vary greatly depending on location, and electricity across all sectors in the US averages about 13 cents per kilowatt hour as of May 2025, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
Aalo will use the new funding to double its staff, growing from about 60 employees now to 120 within the next year. It will focus on hiring engineers and manufacturing talent. That's a sharp increase for a startup that was just Loszak and Arafat less than two years ago.
Loszak's interest in nuclear power is personal. He said he developed asthma while growing up in Canada due to coal-plant smog. Once the country expanded nuclear power, though, Loszak said his symptoms disappeared.
"Lo and behold, smog days went to zero, and my asthma went away," Loszak said. "I thought, 'my God, this technology is incredible.'"
Previously, Loszak cofounded Humi, an HR software startup that Employment Hero acquired for over $100 million in January.
Arafat, Aalo's cofounder and CTO, brings the nuclear chops. He started his career at Westinghouse Electric Company and later worked on MARVEL, an advanced nuclear reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory. Arafat earned his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University.
"When I met him, I just knew he was the right guy to partner with. We had really similar values, a similar vision for what nuclear should become, and even a similar sense of humor, which is important because we spend a lot of time together," Loszak said of Arafat.
Loszak said Aalo's investor, Valor, is a "special partner" for the startup because of its relationships with big data center projects.
Valor backed Elon Musk's xAI in a $6 billion Series B in 2024, and the investment firm is in talks with lenders to secure up to $12 billion for xAI's plan to buy a large sum of Nvidia chips for a new mega-sized data center, The Wall Street Journal reported in July. Valor also participated in AI infrastructure company Crusoe's $600 million Series D in late 2024.
On Monday, Mayor Patrick Collins of Cheyenne, Wyoming, announced plans for an AI data center that would consume more electricity than all homes in the state combined, according to The Associated Press. The facility, a joint venture between energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would start at 1.8 gigawatts and scale up to 10 gigawatts of power use.
The project's energy demands are difficult to overstate for Wyoming, the least populous US state. The initial 1.8-gigawatt phase, consuming 15.8 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually, is more than five times the electricity used by every household in the state combined. That figure represents 91 percent of the 17.3 TWh currently consumed by all of Wyoming's residential, commercial, and industrial sectors combined. At its full 10-gigawatt capacity, the proposed data center would consume 87.6 TWh of electricity annually—double the 43.2 TWh the entire state currently generates.
Because drawing this much power from the public grid is untenable, the project will rely on its own dedicated gas generation and renewable energy sources, according to Collins and company officials. However, this massive local demand for electricity—even if self-generated—represents a fundamental shift for a state that currently sends nearly 60 percent of its generated power to other states.
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“We will drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump declared at his inauguration on January 20. Echoing the slogan that exemplified his energy policies during the campaign, he made his message clear: more oil and gas, lower prices, greater exports.
Six months into Trump’s second term, his administration has little to show on that score. Output is ticking up, but slower than it did under the Biden administration. Pump prices for gasoline have bobbed around where they were in inauguration week. And exports of crude oil in the four months through April trailed those in the same period last year.
The White House is discovering, perhaps the hard way, that energy markets aren’t easily managed from the Oval Office—even as it moves to roll back regulations on the oil and gas sector, offers up more public lands for drilling at reduced royalty rates, and axes Biden-era incentives for wind and solar.
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On Wednesday, the White House released "Winning the Race: America's AI Action Plan," a 25-page document that outlines the Trump administration's strategy to "maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance" in AI through deregulation, infrastructure investment, and international partnerships. But critics are already taking aim at the plan, saying it's doing Big Tech a big favor.
Assistant to the President for Science and Technology Michael Kratsios and Special Advisor for AI and Crypto David Sacks crafted the plan, which frames AI development as a race the US must win against global competitors, particularly China.
The document describes AI as the catalyst for "an industrial revolution, an information revolution, and a renaissance—all at once." It calls for removing regulatory barriers that the administration says hamper private sector innovation. The plan explicitly reverses several Biden-era policies, including Executive Order 14110 on AI model safety measures, which President Trump rescinded on his first day in office during his second term.
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At an AI and fossil fuel lovefest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last week, President Donald Trump - flanked by cabinet members and executives from major tech and energy giants like Google and ExxonMobil - said that "the most important man of the day" was Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin. "He's gonna get you a permit for the largest electric producing plant in the world in about a week, would you say?" Trump said to chuckles in the audience. Later that week, the Trump administration exempted coal-fired power plants, facilities that make chemicals for semiconductor manufacturing, and certain other industrial sites from Biden-era a …
Our water, health, and energy systems are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack.
Now, when tensions escalate - like when the US bombed nuclear facilities in Iran this month - the safety of these systems becomes of paramount concern. If conflict erupts, we can expect it to be a "hybrid" battle, Joshua Corman, executive in residence for public safety & resilience at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), tells The Verge.
"With great connectivity comes great responsibility."
Battlefields now extend into the digital world, which in turn makes critical infrastructure in the real world a target. I first reached out to IST for their expertise on this issue back in 2021, when a ransomware attack forced the Colonial Pipeline - a major artery transporting nearly half of the east coast's fuel supply - offline for nearly a week. Since then, The Verge has also covered an uptick in cyberattacks against community water systems in the US, and America's attempts to thwart assaults supported by other governments.
It's not time to panic, Corman reassures me. But it is important to reevaluate how we safeguard hospitals, water supplies, and other lifelines from cyberattack. There hap …
The blackout that took down the Iberian grid serving Spain and Portugal in April was the result of a number of smaller interacting problems, according to an investigation by the Spanish government. The report concludes that several steps meant to address a small instability made matters worse, eventually leading to a self-reinforcing cascade where high voltages caused power plants to drop off the grid, thereby increasing the voltage further. Critically, the report suggests that the Spanish grid operator had an unusually low number of plants on call to stabilize matters, and some of the ones it did have responded poorly.
The full report will be available later today; however, the government released a summary ahead of its release. The document includes a timeline of the events that triggered the blackout, as well as an analysis of why grid management failed to keep it in check. It also notes that a parallel investigation checked for indications of a cyberattack and found none.
The document notes that for several days prior to the blackout, the Iberian grid had been experiencing voltage fluctuations—products of a mismatch between supply and demand—that had been managed without incident. These continued through the morning of April 28 until shortly after noon, when an unusual frequency oscillation occurred. This oscillation has been traced back to a single facility on the grid, but the report doesn't identify it or even indicate its type, simply referring to it as an "instalación."
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GILA RIVER INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz.—About 33 miles south of Phoenix, Interstate 10 bisects a line of solar panels traversing the desert like an iridescent snake. The solar farm’s shape follows the path of a canal, with panels serving as awnings to shade the gently flowing water from the unforgiving heat and wind of the Sonoran Desert.
The panels began generating power last November for the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh tribes—known together as the Gila River Indian Community, or GRIC—on their reservation in south-central Arizona, and they are the first of their kind in the US. The community is studying the effects of these panels on the water in the canal, hopeful that they will protect a precious resource from the desert’s unflinching sun and wind.
In September, GRIC is planning to break ground on another experimental effort to conserve water while generating electricity: floating solar. Between its canal canopies and the new project that would float photovoltaic panels on a reservoir it is building, GRIC hopes to one day power all of its canal and irrigation operations with solar electricity, transforming itself into one of the most innovative and closely watched water users in the West in the process.
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Currently, there are no nuclear power plants scheduled for construction in the US. Everybody with plans to build one hasn't had a reactor design approved, while nobody is planning to use any of the approved designs. This follows a period in which only three new reactors have entered service since 1990. Despite its extremely low carbon footprint, nuclear power appears to be dead in the water.
On Friday, the Trump administration issued a series of executive orders intended to revive the US nuclear industry. These include plans to streamline the reactor approval process and boost the construction of experimental reactors by the Department of Energy. But they also contain language that's inconsistent with other administration priorities and fundamentally misunderstands the use of nuclear power. Plus, some timelines might be, shall we say, unrealistic: three new experimental reactors reaching criticality in just over a year.
The heyday of nuclear plant construction in the US was in the 1970s and 80s. But the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant soured public sentiment toward nuclear power. This also came at a time when nuclear plants typically generated only half of their rated capacity, making them an expensive long-term bet. As a result, plans for many plants, including some that were partially constructed, were canceled.
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Meta’s building a new AI data center so massive in Louisiana that the local utility company has plans to construct three new gas-fired power plants to provide it with enough electricity. Now, advocates and lawmakers are pressing Meta for answers about how it’ll clean up pollution stemming from the data center’s energy consumption.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, shot off a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday demanding answers about how much energy the data center would use and the greenhouse gas emissions that would be generated. Powering the new data center with gas “flies in the face of Meta’s climate commitments,” the letter says.
Tech companies are rushing to build out data centers to train and run new AI tools, driving up electricity demand. In this case, power utility Entergy wants to meet that demand with new gas infrastructure, raising concerns about the impact Meta’s data center will have on the environment and local residents.
“We urgently need corporate responsibility”
“Meta’s backslide from its own climate pledges risks triggering broader economic harm at a time when we urgently need corporate responsibility,” Sen. Whitehouse said in a statement emailed to The Verge.
In 2020, Meta pledged to reach net-zero emissions across its operations, supply chain, and consumer use of its products by the end of the decade. But the company’s carbon footprint is larger now than it was when it set that goal, according to its latest sustainability report, as it doubles down on AI.
The company has tried to reduce its emissions by matching its electricity use with equal purchases of renewable energy. It’s a strategy Meta and other big companies often take: pay to support new clean energy projects to try to cancel out the environmental effects of your facilities plugging into a power grid that runs on dirty energy. Environmental advocates are increasingly concerned that this strategy still burdens communities with local pollution, and that the pressure to meet rising electricity demand from AI is boosting fossil fuel use rather than renewable energy.
We’re seeing that tussle play out in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta has plans to build its largest data center to date. It’s spending $10 billion on the project, the company announced in December. Once complete, the campus would span 4 million square feet, about as large as 70 football fields. But the project is moot unless Meta can ensure there will be enough electricity available for all those servers, a problem it’s working with Entergy to solve. Entergy proposed building three entirely new gas plants with a total capacity of 2,260 megawatts to support the data center, but it has to get regulatory approval first.
Some advocates contend that there hasn’t been enough transparency around Meta’s data center plans to help the public understand the potential impact on the local power grid. The New Orleans-based Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed a motion in March asking the Louisiana Public Service Commission to add Meta as an official party to proceedings over whether to approve construction of the new gas plants. Doing so would compel the company to disclose more information, and the commission is scheduled to consider the motion on Monday.
“It’s hard to wrap your brain around [whether] a facility like this either might be good for your community or bad for your community without understanding the possible impact to your electrical system, your bills, and your water,” says Logan Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy.
There are already forecasts that rapidly growing data center electricity demand could raise electricity bills in the US. Meta said in December that it would contribute $1 million a year to an Entergy program that helps older adults and people with disabilities afford their bills. Data centers have also been notorious water-guzzlers, although Meta says it would invest in projects to restore more water than it would consume.
Sen. Whitehouse’s letter, meanwhile, asks Meta to answer a list of questions by May 28th. On top of questions about the data center’s electricity use and greenhouse gas emissions, Whitehouse wants to know what the justification is for building gas-fired power plants rather than renewable energy alternatives. And it presses Meta to explain how the proposal aligns with its 2030 climate goal.
Meta maintains that it’ll continue matching its electricity use with support for renewable energy, including a commitment to help fund 1,500 megawatts of new solar and battery resources in Louisiana. It also said it would help fund the cost of adding technology to at least one power plant that would capture carbon dioxide emissions. Whitehouse wants to know how much funding it will provide and how much carbon will be captured. Carbon capture tech has been prohibitively expensive to deploy and costs are often offset by using the captured CO2 to produce more fossil fuels through a process called enhanced oil recovery.
“We received the letter and look forward to providing a response,” Meta spokesperson Ashley Settle said in an email to The Verge. “We believe a diverse set of energy solutions are necessary to power our AI ambitions – and we continue to explore innovative technology solutions.”
Entergy didn’t immediately respond to inquiries from The Verge. It has a goal of making sure that 50 percent of its generating capacity is carbon pollution-free by 2030. But the utility said that gas “is the lowest reasonable cost option available that can support the 24/7 electrical demands of a large data center like Meta,” in a statement to Fast Company, which first reported on Whitehouse’s letter.
China has been installing renewable energy at a spectacular rate and now has more renewable capacity than the next 13 countries combined, and four times that of its closest competitor, the US. Yet, so far at least, that hasn't been enough to offset the rise of fossil fuel use in that country. But a new analysis by the NGO Carbon Brief suggests things may be changing, as China's emissions have now dropped over the past year, showing a 1 percent decline compared to the previous March. The decline is largely being led by the power sector, where growth in renewables has surged above rising demand.
This isn't the first time that China's emissions have gone down over the course of a year, but in all previous cases the cause was primarily economic—driven by things like the COVID pandemic or the 2008 housing crisis. The latest shift, however, was driven largely by the country's energy sector, which saw a 2 percent decline in emissions over the past year.
China's emissions have shown a slight decline over the last year, despite economic growth and rising demand for electricity.
Credit:
Carbon Brief
Carbon Brief put the report together using data from several official government sources, including the National Bureau of Statistics of China, National Energy Administration of China, and the China Electricity Council. Projections for future growth come from the China Wind Energy Association and the China Photovoltaic Industry Association.
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Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum Friday afternoon directing the Department of Energy to “consider using all lawful authority to rescind” or weaken regulations for water and energy efficiency for dishwashers and washing machines. The action also includes water use standards for showers, faucets, toilets, and urinals.
It closes out a week of attacks on policies meant to save Americans money by incentivizing manufacturers to make products that save water and energy. Earlier in the week, CNN and E&E News reported that the Trump administration would shutter the Energy Star program as part of a “reorganization” planned at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Energy Star certifies products for energy efficiency, allowing consumers to choose the most energy-efficient home appliances by spotting the recognizable blue Energy Star label. The rules President Trump is targeting now are actually consumer protections, meant to ensure that any customer can purchase something that meets reasonable efficiency standards.
“Congress enacted these laws, the president can’t just decide that they’re going to go away.”
A White House fact sheet says the Secretary of Energy should work with the Office of Legislative Affairs to make recommendations to Congress on any water pressure “or related energy efficiency laws” that ought to change or be repealed altogether.
It also says the Secretary of Energy should pause enforcement of the rules mentioned in the memorandum until they’re rescinded or revised. “The Federal Government should not impose or enforce regulations that make taxpayers’ lives worse,” the presidential memorandum says.
“It’ll only raise costs for consumers to get rid of these standards, if they get rid of these standards,” says Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “Congress enacted these laws, the president can’t just decide that they’re going to go away.” deLaski also notes that while the White House says it wants to get rid of “useless water pressure standards,” the rules mentioned in the memorandum actually target efficiency standards since water pressure depends on the plumbing system connected to the device.
Trump also signed four bills approved through the Congressional Review Act undoing Biden-era efficiency standards for water heaters, refrigerators, walk-in coolers, and more. In April, the president signed an executive order to purportedly make “America’s showers great again” by rescinding an Obama-era definition of showerheads that raised efficiency standards.
Update, May 10th: This story has been updated with more information about water pressure from Andrew deLaski.
The US data center industry has warned that the Trump administration’s crackdown on renewable energy could slow its growth and undermine Washington’s goal to win the global artificial intelligence race.
Renewables have become a flashpoint since Donald Trump re-entered the White House, with his administration suspending clean energy developments on federal land, pausing federal loans, and last month canceling high-profile projects such as Equinor’s $5 billion Empire Wind site.
For tech companies struggling to secure reliable energy supplies to power and train AI, a clampdown on renewables could create power bottlenecks, drive up costs, and push operators towards dirtier energy, experts said.
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Since the Iberian Peninsula lost power in a massive blackout, grid operators are in the process of trying to restore power to millions of customers and businesses. As you might imagine, the process—termed a "black start"—is quite a bit more challenging than flicking on a switch. However, the challenge is made considerably more difficult because nearly everything about the system—from the management hardware that remotely controls the performance of the grid to the power plants themselves—needs power to operate.
You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That's because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it's burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.
The initial output of these black start facilities is then used to provide power to all the plants that need an external power source to operate. This has to be managed in a way that ensures that only other power plants get the first electrons to start moving on the grid, otherwise the normal demand would immediately overwhelm the limited number of small plants that are operating. Again, this has to be handled by facilities that need power in order to control the flow of energy across the grid. This is why managing the grid will never be as simple as "put the hardware on the Internet and control it remotely," given that the Internet also needs power to operate.
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Donald Trump wants to mine the depths of the ocean for critical minerals ubiquitous in rechargeable batteries, signing an executive order on Thursday to try to expedite mining within US and international waters.
It’s a brash move that critics say could create unknown havoc on sea life and coastal economies, and that bucks international agreements. Talks to develop rules for deep-sea mining are still ongoing through the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a process that missed an initial 2023 deadline and has continued to stymie efforts to start commercially mining the deep sea.
“A dangerous precedent”
“Fast-tracking deep-sea mining by bypassing the ISA’s global regulatory processes would set a dangerous precedent and would be a violation of customary international law,” Duncan Currie, legal adviser for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition that has advocated for a moratorium on deep sea mining, said in a press statement.
The ISA was established by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. More than 160 nations have ratified the convention, but the United States has not. Ignoring the convention, the executive order Trump signed directs federal agencies to expedite the process for issuing licenses to companies seeking to recover minerals “in areas beyond national jurisdiction” in accordance with the 1980 US Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act. A country’s territorial jurisdiction only extends roughly 200 nautical miles from shore.
The Trump administration wants to work with industry “to counter China’s growing influence over seabed mineral resources,” the executive order says. However, no country has yet to commercially mine the deep ocean where depths reach about 656 feet (200 meters) in international waters. There have already been efforts to explore parts of the ocean floor rich in nickel, copper, cobalt, iron, and manganese sought after for rechargeable batteries, though, and China is a leading refiner of many critical minerals.
China responded on Friday: the BBC reported Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun as saying that Trump’s move “violates international law and harms the overall interests of the international community.”
The Metals Company announced in March that the Canadian company had already “met with officials in the White House” and planned to apply for permits under existing US mining code to begin extracting minerals from the high seas.
California-based company Impossible Metals asked the Trump administration earlier this month to auction off mining leases for areas off the coast of American Samoa, which would be within US-controlled waters. Trump’s executive order also directs the Secretary of the Interior to expedite the process for leasing areas for mining within US waters.
Companies seeking to exploit offshore mineral resources argue that it would cause less harm than mining on land. Their opponents contend that there’s still too little research to even understand how widespread the effects of deep sea mining could be on marine ecosystems and the people who depend on them. Recent studies have warned of “irreversible” damage and loud noise affecting sea life, and one controversial study raises questions of whether the deep sea could be an important source of “dark oxygen” for the world.
More than 30 countries — including Palau, Fiji, Costa Rica, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — have called for a ban or moratorium on deep-sea mining until international rules are in place to minimize the potential damage.
“The harm caused by deep-sea mining isn’t restricted to the ocean floor: it will impact the entire water column, top to bottom, and everyone and everything relying on it,” Jeff Watters, vice president for external affairs at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy said in a press release.
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