Oklo Bulls Go Silent After First U.S. Nuclear Fuel License in 50 Years Gets Handed to Jeff Bezos

Live look at Oklo HODL’ers realizing they actually have some real competition to worry about…

If I had to guess what Jeff Bezos’ Google search history looked like this week, I’m going with: “why does my wife act like she’d rather marry Leo DiCaprio” “how to build a nuclear empire without looking evil.”

Because would you look at that? Amazon’s atomic sidekick X-Energy just got the federal green light to cook up reactor fuel for next-gen nukes… the first brand-new license of its kind in more than 50 years.

That approval came from the fun police over at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which authorized X-Energy’s TRISO-X unit to manufacture HALEU fuel at a site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Oak Ridge, for those who skipped history class, is basically the OG nuclear group chat. If America’s atomic program had a hometown, this is it. And most importantly, Bezos’ world domination army (read: AWS data centers) just got one step closer to going full Fallout-core.

(Source: Bloomberg)

X-Energy’s TRISO-X subsidiary can now manufacture HALEU (high-assay low-enriched uranium) in the form of TRISO fuel pellets. And no, this isn’t Homer Simpson glowing-green-barrel energy. These are microscopic uranium beads, about the size of poppy seeds, each wrapped in multiple protective layers of carbon and ceramic.

Those tiny particles are then embedded into graphite spheres roughly the size of billiard balls before being loaded into X-Energy’s Xe-100 small modular reactors.

Not to go full Bill Nye with a lab coat and safety goggles, but here’s the dumbed down version… inside the reactor, helium grabs the heat. That heat boils water into steam. The steam spins turbines like they owe it money. And those turbines crank out YUGE amounts of energy. Boom. Data centers stay alive. Everyone’s Claude Bot stays working 24/7.

It’s worth remembering how we got here. In late 2024, Amazon wrote a $500 million check to X-Energy to help bring its Xe-100 reactors to life.

This happened after the grid basically said: “Hey Jeff, love the AI boom. Unfortunately the waitlist to plug in your 8-million-GPU campus is seven years. Godspeed.”

Each Xe-100 reactor can pump out 80 megawatts continuously for 60 years. That would’ve powered an old-school AWS campus just fine. For instance, the new data centers are planning to use up to 50x that much. You don’t build that with solar panels or even coal. You build that with uranium pebbles.

That said, pump the brakes before pricing in atomic dominance. The TX-1 fuel plant isn’t fully built yet, and it can’t manufacture a single pellet until it clears on-site inspections. Even once everything checks out, the first reactors likely won’t come online until sometime in the 2030s. And while Amazon has contracted for five gigawatts of power, that capacity is expected “by 2039,” which in infrastructure terms is basically tomorrow… but in market terms is several earnings cycles away.

Still, this license matters. A lot.

It clears one of the biggest regulatory barriers for next-gen nuclear in the U.S.. It also sends a signal that Washington isn’t flinching at the idea of parking reactors next to hyperscale data centers.

And if you weren’t able to understand half of what this article was talking about, let me explain it to you like you’re 5. Amazon just locked in its uranium Costco membership for years down the road.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Amazon and Google as mentioned in the article.