Sam Altman from OpenAI to Seek Capital for His Nuclear Start-Up Oklo on the Stock Market

Being connected to just one technology that can transform the world and the way we live and work beyond recognition seems insufficient for Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI. Altman is also the chairman of the board of the company Oklo, a nuclear start-up specializing in the production of microreactors for nuclear fission.

Oklo has announced its plans to go public, not through an IPO, but by merging with another company, AltC Acquisition Corp., established specifically for special purpose acquisitions, of which Altman is a co-founder along with Michael Klein, the former CEO of Global Banking at Citigroup. The capital that Oklo raises from going public is intended to strengthen the supply chain and procurement processes and to build a pilot production facility for its reactor, which it calls Aurora. Oklo is attempting to replicate the nuclear fission process that occurs in nuclear power plants, with much smaller reactors, which could, if successful, be a breakthrough in producing large amounts of electricity. Especially in areas where conventional transmission systems do not reach.

AI and Clean Energy

Altman is currently best known to the global public for OpenAI, the company that developed the ChatGPT chatbot, which captured the public’s imagination late last year, but Altman is also somewhat of a philosopher with a vision for the future that combines not one technology, but two: artificial intelligence and clean energy.

– I believe the future can be radically better than the present, and we really only need two things to achieve that – cheaper sources of energy and lowering the costs of developing artificial intelligence. If we get that, we will be quite surprised at how different the future can be – Altman said in an interview with American media.

Oklo was founded in 2013 by Caroline Cochran, currently the Chief Operating Officer of Oklo, and Jacob DeWitte, its Chief Executive Officer. Both started their work at MIT. Altman joined in 2013. So far, the company has raised about $50 million, and the public offering is expected to bring in an additional $500 million, which Oklo says it plans to use to build its first microreactor.

Oklo’s mini-reactor is designed as a small building, resembling a mountain cabin, which generates electricity based on the principle of nuclear fission without producing nuclear waste, which would, and this is the best part, be powered by waste from existing nuclear power plants.

Energy for Billions of Years

Oklo has already secured a permit from the U.S. Department of Energy to build its first microreactor at the Idaho National Laboratory, a leading national center for nuclear research, which the company expects to be operational by 2026 or 2027. The Department has also committed to providing Oklo with used nuclear fuel to power its microreactor.

In addition to Oklo, Altman has also invested in nuclear energy company Helion, and Microsoft has recently agreed to purchase energy from Helion starting in 2028. This may be part of the deal as Microsoft has invested $13 billion in Altman’s OpenAI.

Multiple investments in nuclear energy are likely an attempt to cover the full breadth of cutting-edge nuclear energy research. Helion is exploring nuclear fusion – the merging of unstable atoms to create energy – while Oklo is working on nuclear fission that splits atoms to release energy. If they succeed in all of this, they would secure energy for, as they say, billions of years ahead.