Sam Altman explains why he’s helping to take nuclear microreactor company Oklo public via SPAC
An artist rendition of the Oklo Aurora microreactor.
Image credit: Gensler
Oklo, an advanced nuclear fission microreactor startup, announced on Tuesday that it is going public via merger with AltC Acquistion Corp., a special purpose acquisition company co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is also the chairman of Oklo’s board.
The SPAC will close by early 2024, Oklo co-founder Jake DeWitte told CNBC in a video interview on Friday, and will raise as much as $500 million for the company.
The capital that Oklo raises by going public will go towards ramping up its supply chain and procurement processes and building a pilot scale production facility for its reactor, which it calls Aurora.
Altman best known for his work with artificial intelligence after Microsoft invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and the company’s ChatGPT chatbot caught the public’s imagination late last year. But Altman’s philosophical vision for a better future is dependent on two technologies developing in in parallel: AI and energy.
“My whole view of the world is the future can be radically better and the two things that we really need for that are to lower the cost of energy and lower the cost of intelligence. And if we get those, we’ll be quite surprised about how different and how much better the future is,” Altman told CNBC in a phone conversation on Friday.
‘I don’t see a way for us to get there without nuclear’
The two prongs of the future Altman envisions are connected: If the use of artificial intelligence scales up in the way Altman sees, it will demand “a lot, lot” of energy, he told CNBC.
Altman met the co-founders of Oklo back in 2013 and recruited them to join Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up shop where Altman was president of from 2014 to 2019. Caroline Cochran and Jacob DeWitte, the co-founders of Oklo, joined Y Combinator in 2014 and Altman went on to lead Oklo’s seed round in 2015, and became Chairman of the Board.
“I’m all-in on energy. I think there’s urgent demand for tons and tons of cheap, safe, clean energy at scale,” Altman told CNBC.
Altman has long promoted the idea that access to energy is a significant determining factor to improving quality of life around the globe.
“The alternative to not having enough energy is that crazy de-growth stuff people talk about. We really don’t want that,” Altman told CNBC, referring to the philosophy that restricting production, consumption and energy use is a way to conserve natural resources. “I think it’s insane and pretty immoral when people start calling for that.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addresses a speech during a meeting, at the Station F in Paris on May 26, 2023. Altman, the boss of OpenAI, the firm behind the massively popular ChatGPT bot, said on May 26, 2023, in Paris that his firm’s technology would not destroy the job market as he sought to calm fears about the march of artificial intelligence (AI).
Joel Saget | Afp | Getty Images
In particular, Altman believes nuclear energy as necessary to meet demand while moving away from burning fossil fuels, which cause global warming. “I don’t see a way for us to get there without nuclear. I mean, maybe we could get there just with solar and storage,” Altman told CNBC. “But from my vantage point, I feel like this is the most likely and the best way to get there.”
Altman is betting on slightly different nuclear projects.
Oklo is working to commercialize nuclear fission, which is the reaction that powers all of existing nuclear power plants, but using much smaller reactors. He’s also invested $375 million into Helion, which is one of a burgeoning industry of startups working to prove out and commercialize nuclear fusion, which is the way the sun generates energy and creates no long-lived nuclear waste, but has never been replicated and scaled on earth.
Altman says fusion, if it can be commercialized as Helion envisions, and Oklo, with its smaller, cheaper nuclear reactors, can co-exist. The need for clean, cheap energy “is so vast” that having multiple source of reliable, clean nuclear energy is a good thing, Altman says. Also, because Oklo reactors are going to be much smaller than Helion power plants, they will likely serve different kinds of customers.
Fundamentally, “the world is just so energy limited, and it’s such an energy deficit, we need all of it,” Altman told CNBC.
Deployment plans and hurdles
Oklo was founded in 2013 with the vision to re-imagine commercial nuclear energy. Conventional nuclear reactors are expensive construction projects that take a long time. The Vogtle plant in Georgia are the latest of this kind of conventional nuclear reactor to be constructed in the U.S., and its budget and schedule overruns have become infamous.
Oklo plans to make much smaller nuclear reactors that can operate with fresh or recycled fuel for as long as a decade before they need to be refueled. Oklo power reactors will produce consistent levels of energy, as opposed to the intermittent sources of power generated by wind and solar, and Oklo is positioning itself to be a source of power for data centers, utilities, defense facilities, remote communities, factories, and industrial sites.
“Oklo has extremely strong customer interest. There’s no lack of desire or need for this,” Altman told CNBC.
Also, Oklo plans to operate the reactors itself and sell the power to customers, making it easier for customers to use nuclear energy without having to take on the responsibility of operating a nuclear reactor.
Oklo is still in the relatively early stages. In May, Oklo signed an agreement with the Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative to deploy two commercial plants in Southern Ohio, and it’s aiming to have them online by 2030.
Oklo also has received approvals from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a plant at the Idaho National Laboratory by 2027. For that reactor, Oklo has already gotten approval from INL to use some of its spent nuclear fuel. The company has also begun the process of applying for necessary approvals to construct a fuel-recycling facility so that Oklo can put what would otherwise be considered “used” fuel into its advanced reactor design.
An artist rendering of the Oklo Aurora reactor.
Artist rendering by Gensler, image courtesy Oklo.
But Oklo has also faced some setbacks: In Jan. 2022, The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is the nation’s top nuclear regulatory agency, denied its first application to build and operate its advanced nuclear reactor. The NRC cited information gaps in the application, but Oklo is confident that it will be able to resolve the issue.
“We’ve made a lot of progress with the NRC dating back to 2016,” DeWitte told CNBC. “In many ways, a lot of the licensing details around this are focused more on what I call structural and kind of procedural elements.”
If Oklo does make it past the regulatory process, it has the potential to make nuclear energy much more affordable than it is now, which is part of what makes Altman interested.
“One of the things that I’m so excited about the Oklo design is that I think the economics can be very, very different,” Altman said.
Some of that is the reactor’s smaller size, but some of it is how the Oklo reactors have been designed.
“We made intentional design decisions to build on demonstrated technology that also uses parts, major parts and components that are used in other industries,” DeWitte told CNBC. “So that means we get to buy into an already established, effectively economy of scale production supply chain.”
The Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, June 9, 2023.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Silicon Valley executives and financiers publicly opened their wallets in support of President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The early returns in 2025 aren’t great, to say the least.
Following Trump’s sweeping tariff plan announced Wednesday, the Nasdaq suffered steep consecutive daily drops to finish 10% lower for the week, the index’s worst performance since the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The tech industry’s leading CEO’s rushed to contribute to Trump’s inauguration in January and paraded to Washington, D.C., for the event. Since then, it’s been a slog.
The market can always turn around, but economists and investors aren’t optimistic, and concerns are building of a potential recession. The seven most valuable U.S. tech companies lost a combined $1.8 trillion in market cap in two days.
Apple slid 14% for the week, its biggest drop in more than five years. Tesla, led by top Trump adviser Elon Musk, plunged 9.2% and is now down more than 40% for the year. Musk contributed close to $300 million to help propel Trump back to the White House.
Nvidia, Meta and Amazon all suffered double-digit drops for the week. For Amazon, a ninth straight weekly decline marks its longest such losing streak since 2008.
With Wall Street selling out of risky assets on concern that widespread tariff hikes will punish the U.S. and global economy, the fallout has drifted down to the IPO market. Online lender Klarna and ticketing marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs due to market turbulence, just weeks after filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and fintech company Chime is also reportedly delaying its listing.
CoreWeave, a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, last week became the first venture-backed company to raise more than $1 billion in a U.S. IPO since 2021. But the company slashed its offering, and trading has been very volatile in its opening days on the market. The stock plunged 12% on Friday, leaving it 17% above its offer price but below the bottom of its initial range.
“You couldn’t create a worse market and macro environment to go public,” said Phil Haslett, co-founder of EquityZen, a platform for investing in private companies. “Way too much turbulence. All flights are grounded until further notice.”
CoreWeave investor Mark Klein of SuRo Capital previously told CNBC that the company could be the first in an “IPO parade.” Now he’s backtracking.
“It appears that the IPO parade has been temporarily halted,” Klein told CNBC by email on Friday. “The current tariff situation has prompted these companies to pause and assess its impact.”
‘Cave rapidly’
During last year’s presidential campaign, prominent venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen backed Trump, expecting that his administration would usher in a boom and eliminate some of the hurdles to startup growth set up by the Biden administration. Andreessen and his partner, Ben Horowitz, said in July that their financial support of the Trump campaign was due to what they called a better “little tech agenda.”
A spokesperson for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment.
Some techies who supported Trump in the campaign have taken to social media to defend their positions.
Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, posted on X on Thursday that “Trump Derangement Syndrome has morphed into Tariff Derangement Syndrome.” He said tariffs aren’t inflationary, are effective at reducing fentanyl imports, and he expects that “most other countries will cave and cave rapidly.”
That was before China’s Finance Ministry said on Friday that it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10.
At Sequoia Capital, which is the biggest investor in Klarna, outspoken Trump supporter Shaun Maguire, wrote on X, “The first long-term thinking President of my lifetime,” and said in a separate post that, “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long term health of an economy.”
However, Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian warned on Friday that Trump’s extensive raft of import tariffs are putting the U.S. economy at risk of recession.
“You’ve had a major repricing of growth prospects, with a recession in the U.S. going up to 50% probability, you’ve seen an increase in inflation expectations, up to 3.5%,” he told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro on the sidelines of the Ambrosetti Forum in Cernobbio, Italy.
Former Microsoft CEOs Bill Gates, left, and Steve Ballmer, center, pose for photos with CEO Satya Nadella during an event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Microsoft on April 4, 2025 in Redmond, Washington.
Stephen Brashear | Getty Images
Meanwhile, executives at tech’s megacap companies were largely silent this week, and their public relations representatives declined to provide comments about their thinking.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was in the awkward position on Friday of celebrating his company’s 50th anniversary at corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. Alongside Microsoft’s prior two CEOs, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Nadella sat down with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin for a televised interview that was planned well before Trump’s tariff announcement.
When asked about the tariffs at the top of the interview, Nadella effectively dodged the question and avoided expressing his views about whether the new policies will hamper Microsoft’s business.
Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014, acknowledged to Sorkin that “disruption is very hard on people” and that, “as a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good.” Ballmer and Gates are two of the 12 wealthiest people in the world thanks to their Microsoft fortunes.
C-suites may not be able to stay quiet for long, especially if the recent turmoil spills into next week.
Lise Buyer, who previously helped guide Google through its IPO and now works as an adviser to companies going public, said there’s no appetite for risk in the market under these conditions. But there is risk that staffers get jittery, and they’ll surely look to their leaders for some reassurance.
“Until markets settle out and we have the opportunity to access valuation levels, public company CEOs should work to calm potentially distressed employees,” Buyer said in an email. “And private company managements should refine plans to get by on dollars already in the treasury.”
— CNBC’s Hayden Field, Jordan Novet, Leslie Picker, Annie Palmer and Samantha Subin contributed to this report.
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