Oklo, NVIDIA, and Los Alamos National Laboratory partner to test advanced nuclear fuel for powering AI data centers

Oklo Inc. (a nuclear technology startup) announced a collaboration with NVIDIA and Los Alamos National Laboratory on April 23, 2026, to validate nuclear fuel designs and build AI-powered research infrastructure at Los Alamos—an effort aimed at creating nuclear-powered AI factories that can run large AI compute operations without grid electricity.

Instead of relying on natural gas or coal plants, these nuclear systems would generate the massive amounts of clean power that training large AI models requires (a single AI data center can use as much electricity as a small city). The partnership brings together NVIDIA's AI expertise, Oklo's reactor design, and Los Alamos's nuclear research capabilities to test whether this approach actually works at scale.

For businesses and governments planning major AI infrastructure, this matters because nuclear power could remove a critical bottleneck: most data centers today are limited by electricity availability and cost. If validated, companies building AI systems could site data centers anywhere with nuclear fuel supply rather than near power plants, and operate with near-zero carbon emissions—changing the economics of AI deployment for large enterprises.