Title: Haymaker Daily — An Extremely Critical Development (Aalo Atomics criticality; Valar FTPC + 30MW Nvidia contract) Show: Haymaker Daily (Substack) — paid Guest: David Hay / The Haymaker Team (Haymaker; co-founder/ex-CIO Evergreen Gavekal) Date: 2026-JUL-08 URL: https://haymaker.substack.com/p/haymaker-daily-553 Length: written post (no timestamps) Note: Paid written post, verbatim text. A short Daily on the nuclear-microreactor race and nuclear as a data-center fuel source. Body reproduced for personal study.
Hello, Haymakers:
Back in March, microreactor startup Aalo Atomics was positively profiled in this newsletter. Over the 4th of July weekend, it announced that its test reactor had achieved criticality. It joins just three other companies in having attained an objective that not long ago seemed well out of reach.
Aalo's rival Valar has notched an even more ambitious milestone by demonstrating full temperature and power conversion (FTPC). It has also signed a contract with Nvidia to provide 30 megawatts (MW) of atomic power to one of NVDA's data centers.
This is likely a sneak preview of what the future holds for powering data centers, with nuclear increasingly supplementing and/or replacing natural gas as the primary data-center fuel source.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, it's worth a reminder that NRC licensing processes are typically measured in years. We're hopeful that the current (and future) administration(s) will remove red tape where possible and maybe compress the regulatory-approval timeframe by, say, 50% or so, but safety requirements and viability stress-testing are essential components in an industry this technologically intensive. All this is to say that Valar's lead, though laudable and impressive, could well diminish or outright vanish over the course of months-long NRC approval testing.
Aalo is truly a microreactor company versus a small modular reactor (SMR) enterprise. The latter is where Valar is positioned and despite the "small" in SMR its reactors are at least five times larger than Aalo's.
This is likely to be an exciting race but the market is so enormous that there is ample room for multiple designs, with each having certain advantages and drawbacks. For example, Aalo's more diminutive reactors lend themselves to mass production, as well as delivery on the same trucks that transport standard containers.
The heated competition among those companies at the vanguard of this nuclear renaissance has the potential to be a significant positive for America. It can't happen soon enough based on China's enormous lead in deploying new nuclear power plants, as numerous past Haymakers have chronicled.
The Haymaker Team