The Nuclear Company launched last year with a different pitch than the growing stable of startups promising to revolutionize atomic energy with new reactor designs. Instead, the Kentucky-based company aimed to upend the nuclear construction process, applying lessons learned from the only two reactors built from scratch in the United States this century to make erecting new projects on time and on budget possible again.
To pull that off, The Nuclear Company vowed to focus its efforts on deploying existing reactors — most likely the Westinghouse AP1000, which the utility giant Southern Company recently finished building at the gigawatt scale in Georgia. That way, the first projects The Nuclear Company embarked on could benefit from the thousands of workers who gained experience on the job at that Vogtle buildout.
Even so, the next large-scale reactor project faces major challenges and dim hopes of catching up to China’s breakneck rate of nuclear construction — despite President Donald Trump’s proposals to ease regulations on nuclear power plants.
To compete, The Nuclear Company says it needs its electricians and welders to be equipped with superhuman capacities to work both productively and within the scope of America’s stringent rules for new reactors. So it’s turning to one of the world’s most powerful — and controversial — software developers to help inject a little Tony Stark into the nuclear job site.
Last week, The Nuclear Company announced a major deal with surveillance giant Palantir to build a software platform equipped with artificial intelligence to give workers a new set of digital tools designed to change how reactors are built in this country.
“We’re building projects in the U.S. like it’s 1970,” Jonathan Webb, CEO of The Nuclear Company, told Latitude Media. “It’s unacceptable.” Currently, Webb estimated, workers building nuclear reactors in the U.S. are productive only about 20% of the time, owing in part to the “wheelbarrows and wagons of paper” at the construction site making sure everything is built to the precise standards required by federal regulations.
“We need to give the American worker every tool to win,” he said. “This is like an Iron Man suit. We’re giving the frontline teams the Iron Man suit so they can roar on the job site.”
Once The Nuclear Company rolls out Palantir’s new software, Webb said, the share of the nuclear worker’s time that is productive will increase “exponentially.” “When people show up to do the job eight hours a day, they have to be able to do the job and get real information so they can perform,” he added.
Palantir’s nuclear entrance
The deal — the terms of which were not made public — marks Palantir’s first major foray into nuclear power.
Since last year, Silicon Valley’s titans have embraced atomic energy as the future of meeting their growing demand for electricity to power the data centers that support artificial intelligence software.
Last September, Microsoft put up $16 billion to restore generation from the functioning reactor of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its AI demands. Weeks later, Google announced a deal to buy 500 MW of power from the next-generation reactor startup Kairos and Amazon bought a stake in the rival developer X-energy within days of each other. In June, Meta inked a 20-year agreement to buy electricity from Constellation, the nation’s largest operator of nuclear plants.
So far, Palantir said it has no plans to underwrite a reactor project built by The Nuclear Company to power its servers. “Not yet,” said Elias Davis, who works in the office of the CEO at Palantir.
But the Denver-based tech behemoth, founded by billionaire investor and Trump ally Peter Thiel, did say it plans “to get more involved in the ecosystem.”
“We’re excited,” Davis said of the potential to expand Palantir’s footprint in nuclear energy. “This is our first big announcement in this category and we couldn’t be happier.”
Palantir’s stock has surged by more than 422% over the past year as the company forged deeper ties with the Trump administration.
In April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to deliver a software program designed to equip the administration’s deportation effort with real-time data tracking non-citizens in the U.S., which former employees complained violated the company’s own ethics code. In May, the New York Times reported that the administration expanded Palantir’s mandate to compile data sets on U.S. citizens. (In a lengthy rebuttal posted on X, Palantir pushed back on what it called a “misleading and speculative” story.)
“Whether we have agreements or disagreements politically is irrelevant,” Webb said, and noted that nuclear power unites both sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. “This is an industry that’s bipartisan.”
Davis said The Nuclear Company will have complete control over the software system Palantir builds. But he said Palantir’s interest in nuclear power dovetails with its work in the defense sector, in terms of restoring America’s ability to compete nimbly against China, Russia, and other geopolitical rivals as tensions brew into conflict around the world.
“The nuclear category in general is in a very high-stakes race,” Davis said. “We as a company have always stood on our two feet strongly to support the U.S. government, the American people and the United States of America. That’s why we’re partnering with The Nuclear company to do what they’re intending to do.”
