Inside the Austin Company Racing to Mass-Produce Nuclear Reactors for the AI Boom

An Austin startup believes it has found a way to build nuclear reactors faster, cheaper and at scale. Now, after reaching a major milestone on the Fourth of July, Aalo Atomics says it’s one step closer to helping meet America’s rapidly growing demand for electricity.

Inside an Austin warehouse, Aalo Atomics is developing a new generation of small nuclear reactors designed to be manufactured in factories instead of being built one at a time on-site.

“The whole internals would be inserted into a big tub of liquid metal,” said Aalo co-founder and CEO Matt Loszak. “That liquid metal carries heat away to turn a turbine and produce electricity.”

Before the company could prove its business model, however, it had to prove its technology.

Aalo was one of just 11 companies selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to participate in a pilot program with an ambitious goal: achieve nuclear criticality by July 4, 2026. Criticality is the point at which a nuclear reactor becomes self-sustaining.

The company announced it met that goal just after midnight on Independence Day.

“Today at 12:20 a.m. on the 4th of July 2026, Aalo Atomics achieved criticality for the first time,” the company announced. Engineers confirmed, “The reactor is critical.”

The milestone marks a significant step for the three-year-old startup and highlights growing momentum behind advanced nuclear technology in the United States.

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AI is driving a surge in electricity demand

Loszak says demand for electricity is growing at an unprecedented pace, fueled largely by artificial intelligence and the massive data centers needed to support it.

“We’re talking about building the equivalent of 50 new Houstons in the next five years,” Loszak said. “That’s 50 to 100 gigawatts of power in the U.S. alone.”

The challenge, he says, is that today’s electrical grid cannot expand quickly enough to meet that demand.

“What we’re trying to do is build nuclear reactors, mass manufacture them in a factory, and deploy them next to data centers,” Loszak said.

The manufacturing process is already underway at the company’s Austin facility, where specialized equipment is designed around producing reactors efficiently and repeatedly.

“We’ve never made the same reactor over and over again — hundreds or thousands of times per year,” Loszak said. “That’s what we’re doing here.”

While the company’s initial focus is supplying power to hyperscale data centers, Loszak says the long-term vision is much broader.

“We start with hyperscalers, but as costs come down, we go after markets that desperately need clean, reliable energy in a small footprint,” he said.

Addressing nuclear safety concerns

For many Americans, the word “nuclear” still brings to mind accidents such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

Loszak says modern reactor designs are fundamentally different.

“Chernobyl had no containment dome,” he explained. “These days, there are a lot of new mechanisms that are possible, both engineered and in the inherent design of the reactor, to stop something bad from happening where radiation could be released to the public.”

A milestone for Texas and the future of nuclear power

Aalo’s successful achievement of criticality gives the company something few nuclear startups can claim: proof that its technology works.

The accomplishment also demonstrates how quickly the company has progressed, going from its founding just three years ago to operating a self-sustaining nuclear reactor.

Loszak believes Texas is well positioned to become a national leader in advanced nuclear energy.

“If Texas wants to lead in energy, becoming the leader in nuclear is a no-brainer,” he said. “And we want to help deliver that.”