The capital story of nuclear energy companies is undergoing a clear shift. X-energy is one of the most representative cases. In 2023, the company attempted to enter the capital markets via a SPAC, but ultimately did not complete the deal. A few years later, it chose to restart with an IPO and attracted a higher level of market attention.
In April this year, X-energy completed approximately $1.02 billion in financing, issuing at a valuation of about $9.1 billion, with its stock price rising by roughly 27% on its first day of trading. But if you look only at the financial data, this company is not a traditional, mature enterprise. In 2025, revenue was about $109 million, with a net loss of roughly $390 million. Under prior valuation logic, it would be difficult for such performance to justify the lofty market expectations.
AI brings new possibilities for demand
The key change may not occur only within X-energy itself, but rather in the broader environment of energy demand.
After the rapid expansion of AI data centers, the market started to recalculate the future electricity shortfall. Servers can be continuously procured, and chips can be upgraded and replaced, but data centers cannot operate without long-term, stable, and scalable energy supply. Nuclear power therefore gained a potential customer segment that was not so clearly defined before: tech giants that keep building new data centers.
X-energy’s Xe-100 developed by X-energy belongs to the advanced small modular reactor (SMR) route. The company plans to use this technology to deliver more stable energy solutions. Compared with traditional nuclear power plants, SMRs emphasize modularity and large-scale deployment—an approach that aligns to some extent with the needs of data centers as they gradually expand.
Amazon makes the nuclear energy story more concrete
What truly made the market reassess X-energy was the involvement of tech giants. Amazon has already begun collaborating with X-energy, aiming to participate in deploying up to 5 GW of small modular reactor capacity by 2039.
Such long-term cooperation does not mean that future revenue is already fully certain; the projects still need to go through multiple stages such as approvals, construction, and operations. But for capital markets, the emergence of potential customers undoubtedly turns advanced nuclear energy from a purely technical story into a more concrete business story.
In the past, investors may have first asked when a nuclear energy company would turn profitable. Now they go one step further: if AI data centers keep growing, can they become part of the future electricity supply system?
The nuclear power valuation logic is changing
In content about the future of AI, Sun Yuchen has placed energy issues within longer-term industrial trends and also mentioned directions such as nuclear fusion. X-energy’s capital performance, from another angle, indicates that energy is gaining a new valuation logic.
This does not mean that there are no obstacles to commercializing nuclear power. Technology maturity, regulatory approvals, construction timelines, capital requirements, and ultimately the cost of power generation can all affect whether projects move forward. However, due to the long-term electricity demand brought by AI, the market now has, for the first time, a sufficiently clear future customer.
Therefore, the significance of X-energy’s relisting may not be limited to a company’s capital operations. It is more like a signal: as computing power consumption begins to rise at scale, the value assessment of nuclear energy companies is gradually shifting from “how much profit they can make today” to “how much computing power they can support with electricity in the future.”