A two-year-old nuclear startup just did something no American company has done before: ran an Nvidia AI chip directly off a compact nuclear reactor.
Valar Atomics Inc. demonstrated its microreactor producing live power for Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture on July 1, 2026, at a small data center in Utah. The milestone is the first known instance of a next-generation nuclear reactor supplying electricity directly to AI compute infrastructure in the US.
What Valar actually built
The reactor uses helium cooling instead of water, targeting near-zero water use.
Valar was founded in 2023 by Isaiah Taylor, who is 27 years old. The company’s reactor design, called the Ward250, is what was used in the demonstration. Valar is also among roughly 10 startups participating in a US Department of Energy pilot program aimed at demonstrating microreactor criticality, with a program deadline set around July 4, 2026.
The company achieved zero-power criticality in November 2025, which is the technical threshold where a reactor sustains a nuclear chain reaction without producing meaningful heat output. The July 1 demonstration was the next step: generating real electricity from that reaction.
The money behind the reactor
Valar has not been quietly bootstrapping this. The company raised a $19 million seed round in 2025, followed by a $130 million round in November 2025, and then a $450 million raise in 2026 that valued the company at $2 billion.
Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus and defense tech firm Anduril, is among the backers. So is Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir.
What this means for AI infrastructure and energy markets
The DOE pilot program is designed to accelerate the regulatory process for microreactors, which is why Valar’s participation matters as much as the demonstration itself. The DOE deadline of July 4, 2026 provides the nearest checkpoint for how seriously to take Valar’s operational claims.