Nuclear energy is having its best policy moment in decades, but investors aren’t buying the hype.
Long-term uranium contract prices climbed to a record of roughly $97 per pound this year, while 38 countries have pledged to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. Washington has also added uranium to its critical minerals list, further strengthening policy support for the industry.
Yet nuclear stocks have moved the other way. Oklo is down roughly 42% year to date, while Centrus Energy trades 36% below its 52-week high.
Short sellers have made an estimated $2.1B betting against Oklo, NuScale Power, and Nano Nuclear over the past year, according to S3 Partners.
Big Tech fuels nuclear revival
US data centre power demand is set to climb from 34.7 gigawatts in 2024 to 106GW by 2035, according to BloombergNEF. Big Tech is scrambling to secure baseload power that renewables alone cannot reliably provide.
Meta struck deals with Oklo and Bill Gates-backed TerraPower, while Google partnered with Kairos Power. Amazon went further, investing in X-energy and signing on as a customer.
Bernstein SocGen Group reiterated an Outperform rating on Constellation Energy with a $296 price target, citing nuclear fleet credibility for hyperscalers that want dedicated nuclear-backed power contracts.
Venture capital has flooded the sector too. PitchBook tracked $2.9B in VC fundraising at fission companies last year, up from $103M in 2020. At least ten reactor designers have gone public or plan to. Oklo alone has raised roughly $3.2B in stock sales since its public debut.
Hype peaked, then reality arrived
The problem is that investor excitement ran far ahead of commercial reality. A collective $30.3B has been wiped from the market value of Oklo, NuScale, and Nano Nuclear since their peak last October, according to the Financial Times.
About 18% of Oklo and NuScale's outstanding shares remain out on loan, a proxy for short selling. Nearly 30% of Nano Nuclear's shares are on loan.
These companies have almost zero revenue for the foreseeable future, and capital expenditure requirements are enormous, says Christian Putz, founder of ARR Investment Partners, who previously shorted Oklo.
NuScale reported a $96.7M loss in just the first half of 2026. Nano Nuclear had no revenue until it acquired a logistics company. Oklo has yet to secure a full construction and operating licence from the US nuclear regulator.
"The stocks were overinflated in price, based on speculation."
Adam Stein, Breakthrough Institute
Timelines are the other pressure point. The earliest any SMR could come online is mid to late 2028, if manufacturers satisfy regulators at pace, according to the Breakthrough Institute.
The majority will arrive during the 2030s. No developers outside China and Russia have yet completed a commercial version of an SMR.
Construction is real but the bar is high
One concrete data point cuts through the noise. Oklo is actively building at Idaho National Laboratory, targeting commercial power delivery to Meta data centres.
TerraPower received a construction licence in March for a Wyoming project after an 18-month review period. That review required 1K engineers, according to TerraPower's CEO Chris Levesque.
The US is also out of practice. America's last two new reactors came online in 2023 and 2024, roughly $20B over budget and seven years behind schedule. JPMorgan's Michael Johnson projects the market has room for only three to six SMR companies to survive long term.
Politics adds a complicated layer
The Trump administration has committed tens of billions in support for the sector, including a $17.5B loan programme and $2.7B in uranium enrichment contracts.
President Trump personally holds between $6.4M and $19.45M in nuclear technology and utility stocks, according to his 2025 financial disclosure, raising ethics questions that add noise to an already complicated story.
For investors, the nuclear story hasn’t fallen apart. Demand is still there, but many of these stocks ran far ahead of businesses that remain years away from producing commercial power. The recent selloff is bringing those expectations back down to earth.