In short: An upstart that has "been making steady progress at inking commercial deals for new reactors"; with Holtec's competing listing withdrawn, the stock rose 12% Thursday. Caveat in the same sentence: its reactors "won't be turned [on] for years, and still face significant regulatory hurdles."
X-Energy designs a new kind of smaller nuclear reactor and has been signing commercial agreements with customers who want to buy them. The article counts it as one of the upstarts "making steady progress" — and when Holtec, a much larger nuclear company, abandoned its plan to sell shares to the public, X-Energy's stock jumped 12% in a day.
The logic of that jump: investors who want to own nuclear power have a limited pool of money for it. A $900 million Holtec listing would have competed for that money; with it gone, the existing listed names are the only way in. The catch the article states plainly is timing — these reactors won't be switched on for years and still have to get through the nuclear regulator, so the stock is a bet on contracts turning into working plants a long way out.
In short: Amazon-backed modular reactor and fuel company whose IPO this year "looks depleted": up 23% on day one to a nearly $12bn market cap, then dropped steadily, shedding more than half its value.
X-Energy builds modular reactors and their fuel and is backed by Amazon. It went public this year, jumped 23% on its first day to a value near $12 billion, and has since lost more than half of that. Jakab uses it as evidence that the nuclear excitement is fading — and he doesn't think the sell-off has gone far enough yet to make these names bargains.
In short: New position — a half-sized 5% weighting established June 11 at $18.62/sh (closed the month at $18.36). "One of the highest-conviction ways to participate in the accelerating nuclear renaissance": the Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled SMR for power and industrial process heat, plus proprietary TRISO-X pebble fuel whose first commercial fabrication plant is licensed and under construction at Oak Ridge. The model is capital-light — technology licensing, fuel supply and services rather than construction or ownership risk — with a Dow four-reactor project in Texas (permitting expected Q1 2027), a 5GW Amazon commitment plus a $500M Series C-1 equity anchor, and Centrica interest. "Not… a short-term trading opportunity but rather a core, multi-year position."
X-Energy is this month's new position — a half-sized 5% stake bought on June 11 at $18.62. It designs the Xe-100, a small modular reactor cooled by helium rather than water, which lets it run much hotter and therefore sell industrial process heat as well as electricity — a market conventional reactors cannot serve.
The differentiator Huhn emphasises is the fuel. X-Energy makes TRISO pebbles: uranium kernels wrapped in ceramic layers that contain the reaction physically rather than relying on operator intervention, and its first commercial fabrication plant is licensed and under construction in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Owning the fuel supply is a moat, because every reactor sold becomes a customer for refuelling over a 60-plus-year life.
The business model is the other half of the appeal. X-Energy licenses technology, supplies fuel and sells services — it does not build or own the plants, so it avoids the construction cost overruns that have historically destroyed nuclear investors. That is what "capital-light" means here: upfront technology fees now, recurring high-margin fuel and service revenue later. Real customers already exist — a four-reactor project with Dow in Texas (permitting expected Q1 2027), a 5 gigawatt commitment from Amazon which also anchored a funding round with $500M of equity, and interest from Britain's Centrica.
The honest caveat, which Huhn states plainly, is timing: the first reactors do not run until the early 2030s, and meaningful free cash flow arrives mid-2030s. This is explicitly "not a short-term trading opportunity but rather a core, multi-year position."
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