Liam Denning, Columnist

DeepSeek Is Coming for Sam Altman’s Other Company Too

Oklo’s prospects depend on AI’s insatiable need for electricity fueling demand for carbon-free electricity and expensive nuclear projects.

January 29, 2025 at 12:00 PM UTC

By Liam Denning

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

A surprise attack.
Photographer: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

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If OpenAI LLC were a listed company, Monday would have been a very bad day for the stock. But Chief Executive Sam Altman also happens to be chairman of another, less well-known company that is listed, a developer of nuclear small modular reactors, or SMRs, called Oklo Inc. Monday was a very bad day for that stock.

Even if the market’s knee-jerk reactions often lend themselves to overinterpretation, Oklo’s 26% sell-off on news of a Chinese competitor to chatbots such as ChatGPT is a useful reminder of nuclear power’s big vulnerability.