Sun Yuchen's Optimism for the Nuclear Energy Sector Sparks IPO Wave

Last year, there was a rumor in the market that Sun Yuchen had bought a power plant in Norway.

To understand his logic, I revisited his previous YouTube videos and found him saying, "If you missed out on Nvidia, you can look further down the line, like electricity or nuclear fusion." He later made it clearer, stating that the end of AI is energy, and nuclear fusion is a direction worth keeping an eye on in the AI era.

At that time, the term "nuclear fusion" felt too distant, and the AI market was nowhere near as fervent as it is now; the market seemed indifferent.

On July 14, Asia's richest man, Masayoshi Son, discussed AI but did not start with chips. He also talked about nuclear fusion.

The SoftBank founder stated that within fifteen years, nuclear fusion could power AI data centers, gradually replacing natural gas. He remained unconcerned about the "AI bubble" and advised Japan not to sit on the sidelines during this wave.

Two individuals, from entirely different businesses and contexts, are both focusing on the same non-existent machine from a perspective that ordinary people find hard to reach.

Data centers are running low on electricity.

### Fusion Hasn't Generated Power Yet, but General Fusion Has Already Gone Public

On July 13, Canadian fusion company General Fusion went public on NASDAQ through a merger with a SPAC, trading under the ticker GFUZ. It became the world's first publicly listed pure fusion energy company.

On its first day of trading, the stock price surged, closing with an increase of about 38%.

General Fusion has approximately $150 million in cash, which the company expects will be sufficient to sustain operations until 2028. They hope to build the first commercial fusion reactor by around 2035.

In other words, what the market traded that day was not a power plant that has already generated electricity.

It was a ticket for nine years later.

The nuclear fusion business has a harsh reality. The progress of scientific experiments can be measured by a few seconds of plasma stability, a material test, or a device parameter; the capital market does not have that kind of patience. It always has to ask, when can electricity be sold, who will buy it, and can the accounts be made to add up?

In the past, fusion companies usually provided grand answers.

Clean energy. Artificial sun. Infinite fuel. Humanity's ultimate energy.

All these terms are correct, but they are too far from the balance sheet.

Now someone has filled in a more down-to-earth statement for it.

AI companies need electricity.

Thus, a company planning to build a commercial reactor by 2035 suddenly has a visible future customer profile. Not some vague public utility company, but rows of AI data centers that have already burned cash to build and are waiting to connect to the grid.

The attitude towards money has changed rapidly.

According to the latest statistics from the Fusion Industry Association, global investments in the fusion industry reached $4.48 billion in the past year, setting a record. This figure has its own industry standards and cannot be taken as evidence that fusion has already won.

But it at least indicates one thing.

There are suddenly more people willing to put down deposits for "distant electricity."

### When X-energy Went Public, the Market Had Already Changed Its Algorithm

General Fusion is just the farthest ticket.

A closer ticket is X-energy.

This advanced nuclear energy company attempted to go public via SPAC in 2023 but ultimately did not succeed. At that time, people looked at it much like they would at someone claiming they were going to build a rocket. The project is huge, the timeline is long, and the financial statements are laid out on the table, which cannot be ignored.

Three years later, X-energy returned with an IPO.

In April of this year, the company raised approximately $1.02 billion, with an estimated valuation of about $9.1 billion, and its stock rose about 27% on its first day of trading. It expects revenue of about $109 million in 2025, with a net loss of about $390 million.

Looking at these numbers alone, they are not particularly appealing.

But it has Amazon.

Amazon's collaboration with X-energy aims to participate in deploying up to 5GW of small modular reactor capacity by 2039.

Not just Amazon, Google has also approached Kairos Power to secure a position for nuclear power in advance.

These collaborations are still far from the actual construction of power plants. Approvals may be delayed, projects may change, and options do not equate to revenue. Anyone who directly considers them as future revenue may easily mistake a reservation for an invoice.

But in the capital market, a reservation has its own value.

When you extend the timeline, you will find that the nuclear energy sector has already seen a wave of public listings in a short time. Oklo, Terra Innovatum, Terrestrial Energy, and X-energy have sent reactor developers to the stock exchange; Eagle Energy Metals has capitalized on uranium mines and small reactor technology; Standard Nuclear has led the market to pursue TRISO fuel. General Fusion and TAE have also brought the farthest fusion story to the public market's doorstep.

In the past, nuclear energy companies sold low-carbon, stable, and energy security.

Today, they have started selling something else.

The qualification for computational power expansion.

First Get the Electricity, Then Continue to Stuff Chips into the Server Room

Why would data centers push such a slow technology to the forefront?

Because no matter how expensive chips are, they can still be ordered.

Electricity cannot.

Servers can be procured in advance, delivered to the construction site, and stored in warehouses. If GPUs are insufficient, Nvidia can ramp up production, AMD can catch up, and customers can upgrade. Electricity does not work that way. It must first be generated, then transmitted, then transformed, and finally, local governments, regulatory agencies, grid companies, and communities must nod little by little.

What AI companies fear most is not high electricity prices.

They fear that the server room is built, but electricity cannot be connected.

A large data center park operates day and night, machines generate heat, and cooling systems also generate heat. When training models, thousands of chips work simultaneously. You cannot tell customers, "Today the wind is weak; the model will answer tomorrow."

Wind and solar power are certainly important, but they always depend on the weather. Natural gas units are flexible enough but carry the old issues of fuel, emissions, and supply. Large traditional nuclear power plants are stable, but their construction periods can be long enough to make internet companies lose patience.

SMR, or small modular reactors, happen to fit in between.

They promise to make nuclear power plants smaller, more standardized, deploying part of the capacity first and then gradually expanding. This promise has yet to be tested through large-scale commercial operations but aligns well with the temperament of data centers.

They are unwilling to wait for a giant power plant to be completed.

They are willing to take a number first.

Long-term procurement agreements written by tech giants like Amazon and Google essentially queue up in front of future electricity windows. They are not just buying a certain kilowatt-hour of electricity; they are leaving a socket for their future expansion.

This brings nuclear energy companies something far more useful than a technical white paper.

Data Centers Chase the Problem All the Way to the Mines

When the issue of "needing electricity" was first put on the table, capital first saw the reactors.

Companies like Oklo, X-energy, Terrestrial Energy, and Terra Innovatum were thus pushed to the front row. They are all selling the new generation of reactors that are still on the way. Some are making fast neutron reactors, some are making molten salt reactors, and some are making SMRs.

SMR stands for small modular reactors. They break down large nuclear power plants that could only be built at the city level into smaller, repeatable, and batch-deployable devices. Data centers like this concept because they also do not want to wait for a giant power plant to grow slowly.

But once a reactor is truly included in the project list, the problems will trickle down.

What does this machine consume?

X-energy's Xe-100 requires TRISO fuel. TRISO sounds like some kind of laboratory abbreviation, but it can be understood as a micro nuclear fuel particle surrounded by several layers of ceramic materials. It must withstand high temperatures and stay in the reactor long enough. No matter how beautifully the reactor design is drawn, without this fuel, it can only remain on the computer. This is what Standard Nuclear is doing.

Thus, Standard Nuclear is preparing for an IPO, and it is no longer just a standalone story of a fuel company.

What it sells is quite unremarkable. There are no lights from reactor launch events, no huge orders from data centers, and no grand promises like those from Masayoshi Son. But when the market begins to believe that advanced reactors will be built, everyone will eventually ask, who can deliver the fuel on time to the doorstep?

Pushing further back, the fuel itself can also become a bottleneck.

Some advanced reactors require HALEU, or high-assay low-enriched uranium. Its concentration is higher than the fuel commonly used in traditional nuclear power plants but far below weapon-grade materials. The name is long, but the logic is not complicated. New machines need a different specification of oil, which is not available in old oil tanks, and there are not many factories producing this oil.

Companies like Centrus are thus being rediscovered.

The problems do not stop there.

Where does HALEU come from? Where does uranium come from? Thus, companies like Eagle Energy Metals, which hold both uranium mine assets and small reactor technology, can also enter the public market along the same line. The mines that were originally farthest from AI have been illuminated by the electricity anxiety of data centers.

This wave of IPOs is not because the nuclear industry suddenly fell in love with Wall Street.

It is more like data centers laying an electricity order on the table and then tracing back along that order. First, check who can build reactors. After they are built, check who has fuel. If fuel is insufficient, check who can enrich uranium and who has mines.

Every step upstream will hit a place that cannot be solved by temporary overtime.

Approvals can be expedited. Models can be iterated. Servers can be procured additionally. Fuel production lines and uranium mines do not respond to these.

So now the market is no longer just asking which company has a good-looking reactor plan. They are beginning to ask which link will delay this reactor from generating electricity by a year.

### After 1973, Oil Was No Longer Just Oil

Before the 1973 oil crisis, oil was already very important.

Cars rely on it, factories rely on it, airplanes rely on it. But what truly made governments suddenly anxious was not that everyone discovered that oil could burn that year, but that they realized they had almost no control over a long supply chain.

Oil wells are far away. Oil tankers are at sea. Pipelines cross borders. Prices are set by others.

Since then, oil has ceased to be just a commodity. It has become intertwined with diplomacy, reserves, war, and industrial policy.

AI is making electricity go through a similar path.

Electricity was originally too ordinary. Plug it in, and the light turns on, the computer runs. Precisely because it is so ordinary, people rarely think seriously about where it comes from.

Until a group of companies began planning to multiply computational power by ten or a hundred times.

That was when they discovered that electricity also has geographical locations, queuing orders, and construction cycles. It is not just a socket on the wall but a road that needs to be reserved many years in advance.

Masayoshi Son talks about fifteen years, Sun Yuchen mentions nuclear fusion as the next stop, General Fusion's stock surged on its first day, and X-energy presents losses and high valuations simultaneously to the market.

These events do not prove that fusion has arrived.

They merely demonstrate that more and more people are starting to worry about whether they will still be in line when it finally arrives.

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