Sam Altman is now chairman of a public company. But it's not OpenAI.
On Friday, the corporate Oklo, which makes a speciality of modern nuclear fission, began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which has not yet generated any revenue, was acquired through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called AltC Acquisition Corp. founded and run by Altman. to the stock market.
Under the ticker symbol “OK“Shares plunged 54% to $8.45 on Friday, valuing the company at about $364 million. According to a, Oklo received gross proceeds of approximately $306 million from the transaction release.
Oklo's business model is based on the commercialization of nuclear fission, the reaction that powers all nuclear power plants. Instead of traditional reactors, the company wants to use mini-nuclear reactors housed in A-frame structures. Their goal is to sell the energy to end consumers US Air Force and large technology companies.
Oklo is currently working on building its first small reactor in Idaho, which could eventually power the kind of data centers OpenAI and other artificial intelligence companies need to power their AI models and services.
Altman is co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, which is valued at over $80 billion by private investors. He said he sees nuclear energy as one of the best ways to solve the problem of growing demand for AI and the energy that powers that technology 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 a way for us to get there without nuclear power,” Altman told CNBC in 2023. “I mean, maybe we could get there just with solar and storage. But from my perspective, I feel like this is most likely and the best way to get there.”
In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte confirmed that the corporate isn’t yet generating revenue and doesn’t currently have any nuclear power plants in use. He said the corporate goals to commission its first plant in 2027.
Going the SPAC route is dangerous. So-called reverse mergers became popular within the low-interest-rate days of 2020 and 2021, as technology valuations soared and investors sought growth reasonably than profit. But the SPAC market collapsed in 2022 together with rising rates of interest and has not recovered.
AI-related firms, alternatively, are the brand new darlings of Wall Street.
“SPACs haven’t exactly performed the best in recent years. The fact that we achieve the result here obviously depends on the work we have put in, but also on what we are building and also the fact that the market sees opportunities here,” said DeWitte, who co-founded the corporate in 2013 . “I think it’s very promising in a lot of ways.” [the] Nuclear, AI, data center push and the energy transition.”
The company has experienced a series of regulatory setbacks. In 2022, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected Oklo's application for a reactor in Idaho. The company is working on a brand new application that it doesn't plan to undergo the NRC until early next yr, DeWitte said, adding that it’s currently within the “pre-application phase” with the commission.
Altman got involved with Oklo when he was president of the startup incubator Y Combinator. Oklo took part in this system in 2014 previous meeting between Altman and DeWitte. In 2015, Altman invested in the corporate and have become chairman.
It's not Altman's only foray into nuclear energy or other infrastructure that might spur large-scale AI growth.
In 2021, Altman led a $500 million funding round for clean energy company Helion, which is working to develop and commercialize nuclear fusion. Helion said in a single blog entry At that time, the capital would begin its Polaris power demonstration generator, “which we expect will demonstrate net fusion power in 2024.”
Altman didn’t reply to a request for comment.
In recent years, Altman has also poured money into chip projects and investments that might help advance the AI tools developed by OpenAI.
Shortly before his temporary ouster as OpenAI CEO in November, he was allegedly is in search of billions of dollars for a chip company codenamed “Tigris” to eventually compete with Nvidia.
Altman invested in AI chip startup Rain Neuromorphics in 2018, based near OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco. The next yr, OpenAI signed a letter of intent to spend $51 million on Rain's chips. In December, the US forced a enterprise capital firm backed by Saudi Aramco to sell its shares in Rain.
DeWitte told CNBC that the info center represents “a pretty exciting opportunity.”
“What we’ve seen is that there’s a lot of interest in AI in particular,” he said. “The AI computing needs are significant. It opens the door to many different approaches to the way people think about the design and development of AI infrastructure.”
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