Why it matters
Aalo Atomics is an Austin company building mass-manufactured sodium-cooled nuclear plants for AI data centers. Its homepage, read on Oct. 31, 2026, says the company went from 2 people to 200 in three years, has raised more than $300 million, and has an operational reactor. The page lists target power costs of 12 to 15 cents per kWh for AI data centers, 7 to 10 cents for smaller utility, industrial, and military uses, and 3 cents for broad grid use. Those are company targets, not prices from operating plants.
On July 30, 2026, Aalo and Crusoe announced a plan to pair Aalo reactors with Crusoe data centers. The release says Aalo will first power a Crusoe Spark modular data center, running Crusoe Cloud, in 2027 as a proof of concept, and that the companies intend to place Aalo Pods, described as 50 MWe plants, at Crusoe data centers by the end of 2029.
What the test reactor showed
The homepage says Aalo fabricated a full-scale reactor in Austin and turned it on in Idaho on July 4, 2026, and it labels that machine the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor. The technology page calls the Critical Test Reactor a zero-power reactor, marks it 100 percent complete, and dates initial criticality to July 3, 2026. A smaller sodium test loop on that page is marked 100 percent operational. The factory page says the test reactor took eight months to manufacture, license, and install and calls it operational today. These pages do not report electric output from the test. The technology page places 10 MWe full-power operation, with a colocated data center, on a separate Aalo-X milestone in the first quarter of 2027.
The homepage says the Idaho reactor facility was the first new one at the laboratory since 1973, that the facility took 36 days, that the Critical Test Reactor was assembled in under four weeks, and that spending from the 2023 founding through that work was under $100 million. The factory page says the Austin line was NQA-1 certified by the Department of Energy after a four-day audit against eighteen requirements.
Reactor and pod
Aalo-1 is listed at 30 megawatts thermal and 10 megawatts electric. The technology page specifies liquid sodium coolant, a graphite moderator, ceramic uranium-dioxide fuel at 8 percent LEU+, near-atmospheric pressure, automatic passive shutdown, and more than 72 hours of fully passive decay-heat removal. The homepage says a reactor is sized for truck transport.
An Aalo Pod is listed at 50 MWe from five Aalo-1 reactors. The homepage specifies three turbines and an install constraint of less than one year. The technology page says the five reactors share multiple turbines, with phased maintenance so the plant is never fully offline, and it lists construction of the first commercial pod as beginning in 2028 under a third-quarter 2028 milestone.
Factory plan
The operating factory described on the site is a 40,000 square foot pilot line in Austin, dated 2024 on the homepage, at 5900 E Ben White Blvd. Later phases on the factory page are not marked complete: 400,000 square feet aimed at hundreds of megawatts a year, and more than 4 million square feet aimed at multiple gigawatts of Aalo Pod production a year. The page says procurement for a first one-million-square-foot Gigawatt Factory begins in 2026, at a stated 1 gigawatt a year per million square feet. The homepage states factory output of 1 gigawatt a year by 2030. The factory page states a goal that the West deploy a gigawatt of nuclear capacity per year by 2030. Those dates and rates are targets.
Licensing path
Aalo Holdings, Inc., operating as Aalo Atomics, sent the NRC a Regulatory Engagement Plan for a reference combined license application on Sept. 15, 2026. The cover letter says the plan was submitted for information. The plan describes a non-pressurized, loop-type, sodium-cooled reactor with a maximum of 30 megawatts thermal, equal to 10 megawatts electric, a thermal-spectrum core, uranium dioxide fuel, and a graphite moderator. It says the reference application comes after full-power operation of Aalo-X, uses 10 CFR Part 53, and is anticipated in the second quarter of 2027, with the date able to move if the Aalo-X schedule moves. It also says Aalo is considering an early site permit by the end of 2026. The Sept. 15 document is the engagement plan, not a filed combined license application.
Crusoe and the published funding figure
The homepage total of more than $300 million, read on Oct. 31, 2026, is the figure the company is currently publishing. The about section of the July 30 Crusoe release still said Aalo had secured over $136 million from named investors including Valor Equity Partners, 50Y, Fine Structure Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, and NRG Energy. That sentence sits in a release whose dateline is July 30, 2026. The same page also shows a September 3, 2026 stamp and does not announce a later round. No commercial Aalo Pod is described as operating. The 2027 Crusoe proof of concept and the first-quarter 2027 Aalo-X power plant remain scheduled work.
What to watch
On Oct. 31, 2026, the technology page still showed Aalo-0, the full-scale non-nuclear sodium system, at 65 percent complete under a third-quarter 2026 label. That quarter had ended. The next items on the same roadmap are the first-quarter 2027 Aalo-X power plant and a commercial pod whose construction is listed as beginning in 2028. Crusoe's release aims a 2027 proof of concept at one Spark module and commercial pod deployments by the end of 2029. The NRC plan describes an early site permit as under consideration through the end of 2026, and it writes the reference license application to follow Aalo-X full power, with a current anticipation of the second quarter of 2027.