Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI and the man who's name has basically become synonymous with AI, has won investor approval for his latest project, nuclear company Oklo, which is set to list on the NYSE Friday via a SPAC .
The company, which trades as ALCC until then will debut under the symbol OKLO at the end of the week. Altman is chairman of the company, which will design and deploying advanced fission power plants to provide the clean and affordable energy needed to power the flood of data centers popping up around the nation as part of the AI revolution.
The company will finalize its deal with AltC Acquisition Corporation today. The merger with AltC, a SPAC backed by Altman and Michael Klein, valued Oklo at $850 million when announced in July. As was announced in a press release yesterday:
AltC stockholders voted to approve the business combination between AltC and Oklo Inc. ("Oklo"), a fast fission clean power technology and nuclear fuel recycling company. Almost 100% of the votes cast at the meeting, representing approximately 72.7% of AltC's outstanding shares, voted to approve the business combination (the "Transaction").
The company's mission is "to provide clean, reliable, affordable energy on a global scale through the design and deployment of next-generation fast reactor technology", the release says.
As Bloomberg noted this week, Oklo - which aims to deploy its first commercial advanced reactor in the U.S. before the decade's end - signed a non-binding letter of intent with Diamondback Energy last month to collaborate on a 20-year power purchase agreement.
Backed by investors like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Peter Thiel, the who's who of the AI revolution, nuclear fusion startups are gaining traction. Sam Altman, who invested in Oklo in 2015, believes the company is "best positioned to commercialize advanced fission energy solutions," per a July press release.
The completion of the Oklo merger will mark ex Citi veteran dealmaker Michael Klein's fifth successful de-SPAC after closing two blank-check firms last year. Last week, he returned to the SPAC market with Churchill Capital Corp. IX, raising $287.5 million. While SPACs fell out of favor after the 2020-2021 boom, there's been a modest revival with serial sponsors like Klein, Nabors Industries, Mistral Capital, and Eric Rosenfeld raising millions for new deals.
Last month, we published a lengthy report discussing why even as the AI trade may be fizzling, the "electrification" trade, aka the "Power-Up America" trade - so urgently needed to run all those electricity-gobbling data centers needed to run AI - is just getting started and has in fact outperformed substantially both the broader AI and Data-Center Equipment baskets over the past two months...
... and Altman - who teamed up with another power company, Exowatt, earlier this year to focus on clean energy for AI power -agrees: "Fundamentally today in the world, the two limiting commodities you see everywhere are intelligence, which we're trying to work on with AI, and energy," Altman told CNBC in 2021.
For those who missed it, in "The Next AI Trade," we outlined various investment opportunities for powering up America, most of which have dramatically outperformed the market. In the next iteration, we will likely add Oklo to the list of beneficiaries certainly ahead of the inevitable cascade of Buy ratings sure flood the name over the next month.
