Valar Atomics, a nuclear-reactor startup based in El Segundo, California, has raised $1 billion in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital, tripling its valuation to $6 billion in a matter of months. The company also secured a separate $200 million credit facility from Erebor, J.P. Morgan, Crescent Cove and Hercules Capital, giving it roughly $1.2 billion in fresh capital to move from building prototype reactors to mass-producing them.
Valar builds small modular reactors — compact, factory-buildable nuclear plants intended to power data centers, industrial sites and military installations without drawing on the public grid. Its Ward-250 test reactor uses a closed-loop cooling system that the company says cuts water use from roughly 2.6 million gallons annually per megawatt in conventional plants to a few hundred gallons. Nine other venture firms joined the round alongside Sequoia, including Valor Equity Partners and Conviction, according to SiliconANGLE's account of the funding.
Betting on AI's power appetite
The round is the latest sign that investors are pouring money into physical power infrastructure to meet artificial intelligence's electricity demands, rather than into software layered on top of it. Valar says it achieved a milestone in June when its Ward-250 reactor generated electricity used to power an Nvidia Blackwell GPU running AI workloads — a demonstration the company describes as the first time an advanced reactor has directly powered AI infrastructure, though that characterization comes from Valar itself and has not been independently verified. Nvidia and Valar are now planning a larger, 30-megawatt nuclear-powered AI facility in Utah.
"AI is building very quickly, and we need a lot of power in every direction," Valar founder and chief executive Isaiah Taylor said, according to coverage of the raise. "This is really about scale for us." Taylor has said the company took two years to complete its NOVA reactor core and a further seven months to bring the Ward-250 to criticality, and that the new funding is meant to compress that timeline toward mass production of "tens, hundreds and then thousands" of reactors annually.
Valar is one of several nuclear startups chasing AI's data-center power crunch, alongside X-energy, which has raised roughly $700 million, Radiant Industries at $300 million and Aalo Atomics at $100 million. The rush reflects a broader shift in AI-era venture capital: some of the largest checks written in 2026 have gone not to companies building AI models, but to firms that control the physical inputs — power, chips and land — that model-builders depend on. Whether small modular reactors can be licensed, built and connected fast enough to matter for data centers under construction now remains an open question the industry has yet to answer at scale.
