Big Tech Reports This Week. Gates, Altman and Nvidia Already Bet on Small Reactors.

Microsoft and Alphabet report earnings on Wednesday, October 28. Amazon follows on Thursday. Meta went first, on October 21, and the capital spending guidance across the four runs from about $135 billion to $145 billion at Meta to about $220 billion at Amazon, with Alphabet at $195 billion to $205 billion and Microsoft at about $175 billion for the calendar year.¹

Then, on Monday, Meta said it would sell up to $95 billion of stock to pay for the buildout, starting with $35 billion of common and convertible preferred shares and following with an at-the-market program of up to $60 billion. The money goes to four AI superclusters of more than a gigawatt each. The biggest, Hyperion in Louisiana, is planned at 5 gigawatts, and Meta will commission 10 new power plants to feed it.²

Read that last line again. A social media company is commissioning power plants. The question on every earnings call this week is not whether the money will be spent. It is where the electricity will come from. The people who run these companies, and the people who got rich building them, have already placed a bet on the answer.

The bet they share

Bill Gates founded TerraPower. In June 2025 the company closed a $650 million round that brought in NVentures, Nvidia’s venture arm, alongside Gates and the shipbuilder HD Hyundai. The head of NVentures said that as AI expands, “nuclear energy is going to become a more vital energy source to help power these capabilities.”³ On March 4 this year the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved TerraPower to build its 345-megawatt Natrium reactor in Wyoming, beside an aging coal plant. It is cooled by molten sodium rather than water, the first commercial design of its kind the NRC has approved in more than 40 years, and the first reactor permit the agency had issued in nearly a decade.⁴

Sam Altman took Oklo public in May 2024 through his own blank-check company. In April 2025 he stepped down as chairman, a move Reuters said cleared the way for a possible tie-up with OpenAI; co-founder Caroline Cochran said Oklo would “explore strategic partnerships with leading AI companies, including potentially with OpenAI.”⁵ Oklo broke ground on its Aurora plant at Idaho National Laboratory in September 2025 and has since been selected for three Energy Department pilot reactor projects, with agreements signed for two of them.⁶

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Amazon anchored a $500 million round for X-energy in October 2024, with Citadel founder Ken Griffin among the investors, and set a target of more than 5 gigawatts of new nuclear projects with X-energy by 2039.⁷ Last week X-energy, Amazon and the utility AEP said they are studying a 12-reactor, 960-megawatt plant on a retired coal site in Sullivan County, Indiana, with Amazon paying for the development work.⁸

Google signed the first power purchase agreement in which a U.S. utility buys electricity from a Gen IV reactor, with Kairos Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority, for up to 50 megawatts to feed two Google data centers.⁹ And in January Meta agreed to buy 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear power, for up to 20 years, from Vistra, TerraPower and Oklo.¹⁰

Gates, Altman, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, Meta. Different companies, different reactor designs, one conclusion: the next unit of AI capacity needs its own power, and the reactor that fits is small.

The Navy has done this for seventy years

Small reactors are not an experiment. On January 17, 1955, the submarine Nautilus signaled “UNDERWAY ON NUCLEAR POWER” from the Thames River in Connecticut. Since then U.S. nuclear vessels have steamed 179 million miles on reactors that fit inside a hull, and no American nuclear vessel has had a reactor accident or radioactive release that harmed human health or the environment.¹¹

Admiral Hyman Rickover, who built that program and personally interviewed every officer who entered it, set the standard in one sentence: “I want everything that I do to be so safe that I would be happy to have my son operating it.”¹¹ What changed is not the physics. It is that the customer with the deepest pockets in the world finally showed up.

It is that the customer with the deepest pockets in the world finally showed up.

Washington cleared the runway

On May 23, 2025, the President signed four executive orders on nuclear power. They set a goal of 400 gigawatts of U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050, up from about 100 today; told the NRC to decide new reactor applications within 18 months; called for 10 large reactors to be under construction by 2030; ordered the Army to be running a reactor on a domestic base by September 30, 2028; and directed the Pentagon and the Energy Department to deploy small modular reactors and microreactors to power defense facilities and AI infrastructure. The orders also created a pilot program with a goal of three advanced reactors reaching criticality by July 4, 2026.¹²

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The deadlines held. By the Fourth of July four reactors, from Aalo Atomics, Antares Nuclear, Valar Atomics and Deployable Energy, had reached criticality under Energy Department authorization. Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s verdict: “we have surpassed that ask and delivered four!”¹³ On September 29 the NRC granted the Tennessee Valley Authority a construction permit for a 300-megawatt small modular reactor at Clinch River in Oak Ridge, the nation’s first commercial SMR, after a review of 14 months. NRC Chairman Ho Nieh: “Four months ahead of schedule is what the new NRC looks like.”¹⁴

The grid is the reason

The demand is not theoretical. Texas set a September record of 86,647 megawatts on September 12, nearly 6,700 megawatts above the previous September peak, and its grid operator has already approved 9,456 megawatts of large loads, grid language for facilities like data centers.¹⁵ Google’s 20-year nuclear agreement with Constellation, announced October 6, adds 890 megawatts from 11 existing Constellation nuclear plants, with deliveries that could start as early as 2028.¹⁰

Who gets paid? The reactor designers, mostly. But also the utilities and sites that host them, the companies that fabricate the fuel, and the suppliers of the components every one of these plants needs. When a technology goes from one approved permit to a federal goal of 400 gigawatts, the companies already positioned in the supply chain get the first call.

The risks are plain. TerraPower’s approval is a permit to build, not to operate. Clinch River needs a separate operating license before it can load fuel.¹⁴ Oklo withdrew one of its NRC construction permit applications this year to focus on Energy Department authorization first.⁶ Meta is selling up to $95 billion of stock, which dilutes its shareholders,² and if AI spending slows, every company counting on it will feel it.

But listen to the earnings calls this week with one word in mind: power. Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon will be asked how they intend to run what they are building. The people who built those companies have already answered, with their own money, and the answer is a reactor small enough to sit next to the data center.