Justin Sun's Favored Nuclear Energy Sector Quietly Sees a Wave of Listings

There was a period last year when the market was buzzing with rumors that Justin Sun had bought a power plant in Norway.

To understand his logic, I dug through some of his old YouTube videos and found him saying something like, "If you missed Nvidia, keep looking down the chain—at electricity, at nuclear fusion." He later put it even more bluntly: the endgame of AI is energy, and nuclear fusion is a direction worth watching long-term in the AI era.

At the time, the term "nuclear fusion" felt too far off, and the AI market rally was nowhere near as heated as it is today. The market didn't seem to pay much attention.

On July 14, Asia's richest man, Masayoshi Son, spoke about AI. He didn't start with chips. He also talked about nuclear fusion.

The SoftBank founder said that within fifteen years, nuclear fusion could have the chance to power AI data centers, gradually replacing natural gas. As usual, he wasn't too bothered by the "AI bubble" and urged Japan not to sit on the sidelines of this wave.

Two individuals, coming from completely different businesses and contexts, both operating from perspectives beyond the reach of ordinary people, set their sights on the same machine that doesn't even exist yet.

Data centers are running out of power.

Fusion Hasn't Generated Power Yet, But General Fusion Has Already Rallied

On July 13, Canadian fusion company General Fusion listed on the Nasdaq through a merger with a SPAC, under the ticker GFUZ. It became the world's first publicly traded pure-play fusion energy company.

On its debut day, the stock price surged significantly, closing up about 38%.

General Fusion holds approximately $150 million in cash, which the company estimates is enough to sustain operations until 2028. They hope to build the first commercial fusion reactor around 2035.

In other words, what the market traded that day wasn't a power plant already generating electricity.

It was a ticket for nine years down the road.

The fusion business has a cruel aspect. Scientific progress can be measured in seconds of plasma stability, a single material test, or a device parameter; capital markets aren't known for that kind of patience. They always have to ask: when can the electricity be sold, who will buy it, and does the math work out?

In the past, fusion companies usually gave grand answers.

Clean energy. Artificial sun. Unlimited fuel. The ultimate energy source for humanity.

These terms are all correct, but they are too far removed from the balance sheet.

Now, someone has filled in a more grounded statement for it.

AI companies need electricity.

Suddenly, a company planning to build a commercial reactor by 2035 has a tangible future customer profile. Not some vague public utility, but rows of cash-burning AI data centers waiting to be connected to power.

Money changes its attitude quickly.

According to the latest statistics from the Fusion Industry Association, global fusion industry investment reached $4.48 billion over the past year, a record high. This figure comes with its own methodology and shouldn't be taken as definitive proof that fusion has won.

But it at least shows one thing.

The number of people willing to pay a deposit for "distant electricity" has suddenly increased.

When X-energy Went Public, the Market Had Already Changed Its Algorithm

General Fusion is just the furthest ticket.

A closer ticket is X-energy.

This advanced nuclear energy company attempted to go public via a SPAC in 2023 but didn't succeed. Back then, people looked at it much like someone claiming they were going to build a rocket. The project was huge, the timeline long, and the financial statements sitting on the table were impossible to ignore.

Three years later, X-energy returned for an IPO.

In April this year, the company raised about $1.02 billion, with an issuance valuation of around $9.1 billion. It closed its first trading day up about 27%. Its 2025 revenue was approximately $109 million, with a net loss of about $390 million.

Looking at these numbers alone, they don't look great.

But it also has Amazon.

Amazon and X-energy's partnership aims to help deploy up to 5GW of small modular reactor capacity by 2039.

It's not just Amazon. Google has also partnered with Kairos Power to secure a spot for nuclear power in advance.

These partnerships are still far from actual power plants being built. Approvals can be delayed, projects can change, and options don't equal revenue. Anyone treating them directly as future revenue is likely mistaking a reservation for an invoice.

But in capital markets, a reservation holds its own value.

Looking at the timeline, you'll find that nuclear energy companies have gone public in batches in a short period. Oklo, Terra Innovatum, Terrestrial Energy, and X-energy have taken reactor developers to the exchange; Eagle Energy Metals has capitalized on both uranium mining and small reactor technology; Standard Nuclear has led the market all the way to TRISO fuel. General Fusion and TAE have brought even the furthest fusion narratives to the doorstep of public markets.

In the past, nuclear energy companies sold low-carbon, stability, and energy security.

Today, they are starting to sell something else.

The qualification for computing power expansion.

Secure the Power First to Keep Packing Chips into Data Centers

Why have data centers pushed such a slow technology to the forefront?

Because even if chips are expensive, they can be ordered.

Electricity cannot.

Servers can be purchased in advance, shipped to the site, and stored in warehouses. If GPUs are in short supply, Nvidia can ramp up production, AMD can catch up, and customers can upgrade. Electricity doesn't work that way. It requires generation first, then transmission, then substations, then approvals from local governments, regulators, grid companies, and communities.

The thing AI companies fear most isn't high electricity prices.

They fear building the data center and not being able to connect to the grid.

A large data center campus runs 24/7. The machines generate heat, and the cooling systems generate heat too. Training models involves thousands of chips working simultaneously. You can't tell a customer, "The wind isn't blowing today, the model will answer questions tomorrow."

Wind and solar are certainly important, but they are always dependent on the weather. Natural gas units are flexible but come with old problems related to fuel, emissions, and supply. Large traditional nuclear plants are very stable, but their construction timelines can drag on long enough to make internet companies lose patience.

SMR, or Small Modular Reactors, sits right in the middle.

It promises to make nuclear plants smaller, more standardized, deployable in parts, and expandable gradually. This promise hasn't been tested by large-scale commercial operation, but it fits the temperament of data centers well.

They are unwilling to wait for a giant power station to be built.

They are willing to take a number first.

The long-term procurement arrangements made by tech giants like Amazon and Google are essentially ways for them to queue up at the future power window. They aren't just buying a unit of electricity; they are also reserving a socket for their future expansion.

This brings something to nuclear energy companies that is far more useful than any technical white paper.

Data Centers Trace the Problem All the Way to the Mine

When the "need for electricity" was first laid out, capital saw reactors first.

Companies like Oklo, X-energy, Terrestrial Energy, and Terra Innovatum were pushed to the front. They are all selling next-generation reactors that are still on the way. Some work on fast neutron reactors, some on molten salt reactors, some on SMRs.

SMRs are small modular reactors. They shrink the massive nuclear power plants, which previously were only built on a city scale, into smaller, replicable devices that can be deployed in batches. Data centers like this concept because they also don't want to wait for a giant power station to slowly take shape.

But once reactors are actually scheduled for a project, the problem goes deeper.

What does this machine eat?

X-energy's Xe-100 requires TRISO fuel. TRISO sounds like a lab abbreviation, but it can be understood as a micro nuclear fuel particle wrapped in several layers of ceramic materials. It needs to withstand high temperatures and last long enough inside the reactor. No matter how beautifully a reactor design is drawn, without this fuel, it remains stuck on a computer. That's precisely what Standard Nuclear does.

Therefore, Standard Nuclear's preparation for an IPO is no longer just a story about a fuel company.

What it sells is very unassuming. No grand reactor launch lights, no massive data center orders, no bold fifteen-year proclamations like Masayoshi Son's. But when the market starts to believe that advanced reactors will be built, sooner or later, someone will ask who can deliver the fuel on time.

Pushing further back, fuel itself can become a bottleneck.

Some advanced reactors require HALEU, High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium. Its enrichment level is higher than the fuel commonly used in traditional nuclear plants but far below weapons-grade material. It's a long name, but the logic isn't complicated. New machines need a different grade of fuel, which isn't available in old storage tanks, and there aren't many facilities producing it.

Companies like Centrus have therefore been rediscovered.

And the questions don't stop there.

Where does HALEU come from? Where does the uranium come from? Thus, companies like Eagle Energy Metals, which hold both uranium mining assets and small reactor technology, can also enter the public market along the same line. The mines, originally furthest from AI, have been lit up by the data centers' anxiety over electricity.

This wave of IPOs isn't because the nuclear industry suddenly fell in love with Wall Street.

It's more like data centers laid out an electricity purchase order on the table, and then started tracing back along that order. First, checking who can build the reactor. Then, after building it, checking who has the fuel. If fuel is insufficient, checking who can enrich the uranium, and who owns the mines.

Every step up the supply chain encounters a bottleneck that can't be fixed by working overtime.

Approvals can be expedited. Models can be iterated. Server orders can be increased. Fuel production lines and uranium mines don't respond to that kind of pressure.

So, the market is no longer just asking which company has an attractive reactor design. They are starting to ask which link in the chain will cause the reactor to start generating power a year late.

After 1973, Oil Was No Longer Just Oil

Before the 1973 oil crisis, oil was already very important.

Cars ran on it, factories relied on it, planes flew on it. But what truly made governments around the world suddenly nervous wasn't that they discovered oil could burn that year. It was that they realized they had almost no control over a long and complex supply chain.

The oil wells were far away. The tankers were at sea. Pipelines crossed borders. Prices were set by others.

From then on, oil was no longer just a commodity. It became intertwined with diplomacy, strategic reserves, warfare, and industrial policy.

AI is leading electricity down a similar path.

Electricity used to be too ordinary. Plug it in, the light turns on, the computer runs. Precisely because it was so ordinary, people rarely gave serious thought to where it came from.

Until a group of companies started planning to multiply their computing power tenfold, a hundredfold.

That's when they discovered that electricity also has a geographical location, a queue, and a construction timeline. It isn't just a socket on the wall; it's a road that needs to be booked many years in advance.

Masayoshi Son talks about fifteen years, Justin Sun says nuclear fusion is the next stop, General Fusion surged on its debut, and X-energy presented both losses and a huge valuation to the market.

Put together, these events don't prove that fusion has arrived.

They only prove that more and more people are starting to worry that when it finally does arrive, they might not be able to get a reservation.