Sam Altman currently serves as chairman of a publicly traded company. But it’s not OpenAI.
On Friday, advanced nuclear fission company Oklo began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which is not yet profitable, has gone public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called AltC Acquisition Corp., founded and led by Altman.
below the ticker symbol.Oklo‘s stock price plunged 54% to $8.45 on Friday, valuing the company at about $364 million. One source said Oklo received total proceeds of approximately $306 million from the deal. release.
Oklo’s business model is based on the commercialization of nuclear fission, the reaction that fuels all nuclear power plants. Instead of traditional nuclear reactors, the company aims to use small reactors housed in A-frame structures. Its goal is to sell energy to end users such as: usa air force and large technology companies.
Oklo is currently working on building its first small-scale nuclear reactor in Idaho, which will eventually power the types of data centers OpenAI and other artificial intelligence companies need to run their AI models and services. There is a possibility of supply.
Mr. Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which is valued by private investors at more than $80 billion. He said he believes nuclear energy is one of the best ways to solve the problem of increasing demand for energy to power AI and its technologies, without relying on fossil fuels. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have also invested in nuclear power plants in recent years.
“I don’t see any way we’re going to get there without nuclear power,” Altman told CNBC in 2023. It’s the most likely and best way to get there. ”
Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitt acknowledged in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the company is not yet profitable and does not have any nuclear power plants installed at this time. He said the company is targeting 2027, when the first factory will be operational.
Going the SPAC route is risky. So-called reverse mergers became popular during the low interest rate era of 2020 and 2021, when valuations for tech companies soared and investors sought growth rather than profits. However, the SPAC market collapsed in 2022 as interest rates rose and has not recovered.
Meanwhile, AI companies have become Wall Street’s new darlings.
“SPACs haven’t necessarily had the best performance over the past few years, so to get the kind of results we’ve got here is obviously a product of the effort we’ve put in, but we’ve also built “There’s also the fact that the market thinks there’s an opportunity here, and I think this is very promising on a number of fronts,” said DeWitt, who co-founded the company in 2013. Told. [the] Nuclear power, AI, data center advancement, and the energy transition part. ”
The company has experienced its fair share of regulatory setbacks. In 2022, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected Oklo’s application for an Idaho reactor. DeWitt said the company is working on a new application but does not intend to submit it to the NRC until early next year, adding that it is currently in the “pre-application engagement” stage with the commission.
Altman got involved with Oklo while he was president of startup incubator Y Combinator. Oklo joined the program in 2014 after some trouble. previous meeting Between Altman and DeWitt. Mr. Altman invested in the company in 2015 and became chairman.
This isn’t Altman’s only foray into nuclear power and other infrastructure that could fuel massive growth in AI.
In 2021, Altman led a $500 million funding round for Helion, a clean energy company working to develop and commercialize nuclear fusion.Hellion said: blog post At that point, the capital was planning for a demonstration of its Polaris generator, which it hopes to demonstrate net fusion power in 2024.
Altman did not respond to requests for comment.
Altman has also poured money in recent years into developing and investing in chips that could help improve the AI tools OpenAI builds.
Just before he was briefly ousted as CEO of OpenAI in November, he said: reportedly Seeking billions of dollars for an eventual competing chip venture codenamed “Tigris” Nvidia.
In 2018, Altman invested in Rain Neuromorphics, an AI chip startup based near OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters. The following year, OpenAI signed a letter of intent to spend $51 million on Rain’s chips. In December, the US forced a Saudi Aramco-backed venture capital firm to sell its stake in Reign.
DeWitt told CNBC that the data center is a “very exciting opportunity.”
“What we’ve seen is a lot of interest in AI in particular,” he said. “The need for AI computing is important. It opens the door to different approaches in terms of how people think about designing and developing AI infrastructure.”
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