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Nuclear startup Oklo (OKLO) just recorded the most landmark month in its corporate history. In early August, its isotope test reactor Groves in Lockhart, Texas, achieved a controlled nuclear chain reaction for the first time — a milestone known as “first criticality” — reached just 11 months after breaking ground on an empty site. Shortly thereafter, the company reported its first-ever revenue of approximately $1.2 million, primarily from technical services. Shares closed up 1.03% that day at $42.09, giving the company a market capitalization of about $7.8 billion.
However, an operating test reactor is not a power business. Oklo’s actual product — electricity sold from its Aurora powerhouses under long-term contracts — does not yet exist, and the growth stock’s valuation hinges precisely on when that power revenue materializes.
Based on the company’s own published timeline, one conclusion is clear: Oklo will not book its first dollar of commercial power revenue before 2028.
The first Aurora powerhouse, located at Idaho National Laboratory (Aurora-INL), broke ground on September 22, 2025. In July of this year, the company projected commercial operation in late 2027 or early 2028; by August’s quarterly filing, the language had firmed into “an ambitious target of deploying our first powerhouse in 2028” — a descriptor from management itself, with the earlier “early” edge of the old window now gone.
The plant’s initial authorization pathway runs through the Department of Energy (DOE) rather than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) — a faster route, but one with defined gates. The DOE’s regulatory process for operating a nuclear facility consists of five steps, of which two are complete: the Nuclear Safety Design Agreement (approved in early 2026) and the Preliminary Documented Safety Analysis (approved June 11). Three steps remain.
Fuel presents another hard constraint. The first core depends on a DOE award of five metric tons of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) recovered from decades-old government reactor fuel, which Oklo must fabricate into finished fuel at a new facility at the Idaho site. Commercial HALEU supply for subsequent powerhouses, under the company’s letter of intent with Centrus Energy, is not expected to begin delivery until 2029. Notably, social media giant Meta has agreed to support up to 1.2 gigawatts of development at a planned Ohio campus, prepaying to help fund fuel — a sign that AI data center operators are lining up power years in advance, with demand-side readiness apparently outpacing supply-side preparation.
Only after construction, the remaining approvals, fuel fabrication and loading, and start-up testing does Oklo’s “build-own-operate-sell” business model actually switch on. If start-up comes in 2028, then power revenue arrives that same year, at the earliest.
Could it come earlier? That would require a first-of-a-kind plant, on first-of-a-kind fuel, with three regulatory gates still open, to beat the company’s own target by months. Groves demonstrates that this team moves fast — but it is a low-power test reactor built on private land under the same DOE pilot program, a fraction of the 75-megawatt Aurora’s complexity. Encouraging, yes. A schedule for a commercial plant, no.
That said, this does not mean Oklo will remain revenue-free until 2028. On the company’s August earnings call, management indicated that first revenue from its isotope business is more likely to come from the NRC-licensed Idaho Radiochemistry Laboratory than from Groves, in the first half of 2027. Groves, meanwhile, is expected to spend the next year or so ramping up to research-and-development quantities of isotopes.
From a financial standpoint, Oklo is well-positioned to wait: the company ended June with approximately $3 billion in cash and marketable securities, with 2026 guidance calling for $120 million to $150 million in operating cash use and $400 million to $500 million in capital spending on property and equipment. The funding to reach 2028 is firmly in hand.
It is worth noting that a 2028 start-up would itself be an achievement — going from groundbreaking to commercial nuclear power in about three years is a pace the industry has not managed in decades. Investors should view 2026 and 2027 as years for milestones and isotope sales. Power revenue, if the target holds, arrives in 2028.
