Announcing the Aalo Pod

Today we are officially introducing the Aalo Pod to the world.  

The Aalo Pod is our 50MWe extra modular reactor (XMR).  It is purpose-built to provide fast, reliable, clean, safe, and scalable on-site power for modern data centers.  At its core is our groundbreaking Aalo-1 advanced reactor technology.

This product results from countless hours of market research, past experiences, and customer conversations.  It represents an amalgamation of what we’ve heard directly from our customers, with a lot of “reading between the lines”, interpreting rationale, understanding requirements, surveying the market landscape, and anticipating “where the puck is going to be” in a few short years when the product will generally be commercially available.

Why the focus on the data center?  Today’s digital revolution—accelerated by cloud computing, hyperscale data centers, and the explosion of AI—has ushered in an unprecedented demand for reliable, clean, scalable power. Traditional power solutions increasingly struggle to keep pace. Here's why conventional energy sources fall short and how the Aalo Pod strategically bridges these gaps.

The Limitations of Traditional Power Solutions

Today's data centers face intense pressures: rapid growth, stringent reliability requirements, siting challenges, and aggressive sustainability goals. Typical power solutions present numerous drawbacks:

• The Existing Electric Grid: While relatively ubiquitous, relatively reliable, and well understood, the existing electric grid cannot keep up with the rapidly growing demand for power.  Severe limitations with transmission & distribution capabilities and/or generation capacity mean that customers must wait unacceptably long times to get power to their data center.  There is no fast or easy fix to these limitations.
  
  
• Solar and Wind: While renewable and emission-free, solar and wind require extensive land use, and their intermittent nature necessitates additional firming solutions like batteries or backup generators. These solutions introduce complexity, higher overall costs, and logistical hurdles. Data centers requiring stable, around-the-clock power find these limitations prohibitive.
  
  
• Geothermal and Hydro: These clean energy sources face severe geographic constraints. Hydropower needs proximity to major water bodies, which significantly limits site selection. Geothermal energy requires rare geological conditions, further narrowing options. This geographical inflexibility is incompatible with modern data center expansion strategies. Also, these technologies are difficult to scale at a given site.
  
  
• Gas Turbines and Generators: Fossil-fuel-based solutions such as gas turbines can be deployed quickly and economically, but their dirty nature and carbon emissions contradict corporate sustainability and ESG mandates. As regulations tighten, these solutions become increasingly untenable. While many are resorting to gas turbines in the short term, the plan is to find a better business model fit for data centers.    

Why is Nuclear a strong fit for powering data centers?

Nuclear power presents several advantages aligning with data center needs:

·      24/7 Baseload Capability: Nuclear reactors provide a constant, reliable power supply, matching the 24/7 operational requirements of data centers.

·      Domestic Supply Chain: Unlike other clean energy systems, the supply chain for nuclear is heavily reliant on local and domestic sources (i.e., US manufacturing)

·      Carbon-Free Generation: As a zero-carbon energy source, nuclear power supports sustainability goals and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

·      Long-Term Cost Stability: Nuclear energy offers predictable and stable energy costs over extended periods, aiding financial planning.

Despite these benefits, nuclear power faces several hurdles:

Legacy Large Nuclear Power Plants provide reliable, carbon-free baseload power, yet their scale, time to power, and complexity are problematic. Construction timelines often span a decade or more, creating misalignment with data center deployment cycles. Furthermore, these plants require lengthy refueling periods—usually an entire month every 18 months—severely disrupting continuous operations and reliability targets.

Conventional Advanced Nuclear Solutions (SMRs, Microreactors) offer promising technology but sub-optimal designs for the data center.  Generally speaking, SMRs have the same challenges as large-scale reactors.  They can take almost as long to construct and cost just as much as large-scale reactors, even though they generate only a fraction of the power.  Microreactors typically generate too little power to meet the demands of power-hungry data centers.  They are optimized for mobility and challenging logistics environments and, as a result, are economically unfeasible on the most accurate scales. The ideal data center solution requires better power density, siting, scaling, and speed.

A New Category of Advanced Nuclear Reactor

We believe that for today’s massive data center market demand, another category is needed that blends the benefit of the factory manufacturing of microreactors, the power levels of SMRs, and the economic targets of a large reactor.  We call it the XMR.  The “X” is used because this reactor category is extremely flexible and extra modular.

To be extremely flexible, an XMR is:

•       Extra modular, meaning both the reactor and the plant are fully modular

•       Expressly designed for the modern data center and mainstream markets

•       Expandable - to be deployable at a wide range of scales from small to large, encompassing 10’s, 100’s, and 1000’s of MWs, and characterized by “pay as you grow” scalability

•       Extensible - to be a strong solution behind the meter (on-site, distributed generation) as well as in front of the meter (utility deployments)

•       Expedient – able to be sited almost anywhere and eliminating almost all on-site construction through factory manufacturing, easy field assembly, and a streamlined regulatory path.

•       NOT exotic - with a simple and robust supply chain with common, available materials, and fuel, and,

•       NOT expensive – with attractive economics at a variety of scales

Why the Aalo Pod XMR is the Ideal Solution

Recognizing the critical issues from extensive customer engagement, the Aalo Pod is specifically tailored to the modern data center market. The Aalo Pod directly addresses each shortfall outlined above:

• Optimized Scalability and Footprint: The Aalo Pod is built around 50MW modular blocks, easily scalable up to gigawatt levels. Its compact footprint—100MW on less than five acres—provides unmatched site flexibility and optimal land utilization, far surpassing solar, wind, and conventional nuclear solutions.
• Superior Reliability through Built-in Redundancy: The Aalo Pod is uniquely designed for 98% reliability, higher than any other power source. It can also be reconfigured to achieve 99.9% by a single pod and 99.999% with multiple pods. Each standard Pod comprises five Aalo-1 reactors paired with a single power-generating turbine. An N+1 redundancy configuration can maintain continuous power output even during maintenance or refueling periods. With one reactor offline for routine service or unexpected maintenance, the remaining reactors seamlessly maintain full-rated power output, eliminating downtime.
• Flexible Siting: The Aalo Pod is designed to offer Data Center customers a tremendous amount of flexibility in siting with a relatively small footprint and EPZ (emergency planning zone), a safe, secure, and ruggedized architecture, compatibility with existing grid, generation/storage, and other electrical equipment (e.g., transformers, switch gear, etc.) already in use at the site, and no need for nearby water sources (e.g., rivers, streams).
• Rapid, Scalable Deployment: Aalo Pods leverage factory-manufactured, extra modular reactors (meaning BOTH the reactor and the rest of the plant are modular), drastically reducing on-site assembly and commissioning time. We expect to deliver power generation solutions from an Aalo Pod within 12 months from order placement and a few months for each additional pod, a fraction of the time required for gigawatt-scale nuclear plants (even when compared on a per-MW basis).
• Grid Flexible Operations: Unlike conventional sources that rely heavily on the grid or face lengthy delays for grid interconnect, Aalo Pods support fully independent, grid-parallel, or hybrid operations from day one. This provides significant flexibility for data centers facing local utility constraints or aiming for complete autonomy.
• Zero Emissions, Maximum Sustainability: The Aalo Pod generates zero carbon emissions, uses minimal water, and safely contains all radioactive material. This aligns perfectly with corporate environmental and sustainability commitments and addresses growing regulatory and societal demands for cleaner energy.
• Cost-Competitive and Economically Predictable: Aalo's factory-driven manufacturing approach achieves significant cost savings through economies of scale. Initial deployments offer predictable, competitive power prices with a clear pathway to reach even lower costs as production scales.

What Our Customers Have Taught Us

Through extensive customer dialogues, we've identified crucial insights:

• Data center operators need solutions that meet regulatory and environmental standards and must align with their rapid growth models, economic realities, and reliability mandates.
• Operators favor modular, expandable solutions that match growth increments (e.g. 50MW) without overspending initially, a key attribute built into the Aalo Pod design.
• High-quality, clean, stable power is non-negotiable, ensuring continuous, fault-free operation of sensitive IT equipment.
• Flexible siting and collocation offer the data center customer tremendous flexibility in selecting locations that provide immense value to their business.
• Minimal on-site management and near-zero maintenance burdens are essential, addressed by our automated control systems and centralized remote monitoring.

The Aalo Difference: Vision and Execution

Our strategic approach leverages insights from early customer conversations, extensive market analysis, and forward-looking trends, particularly around AI-driven workloads. Unlike other players in the crowded nuclear space, Aalo was founded at the precipice of the data center boom, enabling us to prioritize data center-specific challenges in our product strategy from inception.

The Aalo Pod stands apart not only because of superior technology and thoughtful engineering but also because of our relentless commitment to listening, adapting, and anticipating customer needs through thoughtful ethnography. The result is a product meticulously aligned with the modern market, ensuring we don't just meet today's needs—we anticipate tomorrow's challenges.

The future of data center power is here, and the strategic foresight and customer-centric innovation of the Aalo Pod will power it.

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