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Crusoe and Aalo Atomics announced a strategic partnership on July 30, 2026 to build what they say will be the first nuclear-powered AI Factory. The plan pairs a turnkey Crusoe Spark modular data center running Crusoe Cloud with power from an Aalo eXtra-Modular Reactor (XMR) at Idaho National Laboratory, targeted for a 2027 proof of concept.
An XMR On A Data-Center Skid
Aalo has already begun work on a second reactor next to its 10 MWe Aalo-X test reactor at INL, which reached criticality on July 4, 2026, meeting President Trump's deadline for companies in the DOE Reactor Pilot Program. That commercial-scale system will produce electricity for the on-site Crusoe Spark data center. By the end of 2029, the two companies intend to deploy Aalo Pods and 50 MWe XMR plants at additional Crusoe sites.
Crusoe's Spark Is A Data Center On A Truck Bed
Crusoe Spark is a prefabricated, container-scale AI data center that bundles power, cooling, fire suppression, remote monitoring and high-density GPU racks into repeatable modules. Deployments can scale from hundreds of kilowatts to hundreds of megawatts and, Crusoe claims, be delivered in as little as three months. Pairing that footprint with an off-the-shelf modular reactor is a bet that hyperscale AI power demand — which even OpenAI's 3.2 GW Project Camellia campus is racing to satisfy — will outrun the grid.
Nuclear Becomes The Default AI Power Story
The deal continues an accelerating alignment between AI hyperscalers and small modular reactors. Holtec cleared NRC license termination for four SMR-300 reactors at Oyster Creek the same week, and Aalo's own test reactor went critical earlier this month. For Crusoe, which is in talks to raise $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation, nuclear is the missing ingredient in a stack that already spans data-center design, GPU procurement, cloud services and managed inference.
Reporting based on the Crusoe newsroom announcement and coverage from Power Magazine, Data Center Dynamics and Yahoo Finance.