Aalo unveils microreactors option for data centres

Wednesday, 9 April 2025

The Austin, Texas-based company says the Aalo Pod is "purpose-built to provide fast, reliable, clean, safe, and scalable on-site power for modern data centres" and "results from countless hours of market research, past experiences, and customer conversations".

It says: "Each Aalo Pod contains five Aalo-1 reactors, is fully modular (both the reactor and the plant) and can scale seamlessly to gigawatts. With a small physical footprint and no need for external water sources, the Aalo Pod is easy to co-locate onsite with the data centre. Aalo's ability to mass manufacture and ship the entire Aalo Pod via standard shipping methods significantly shortens installation time. Additionally, Aalo-1 reactors are sodium-cooled and use proven-safe, readily available low enriched uranium fuel (LEU+)."

The Aalo Pod is built around 50 MWe modular blocks, scalable up to gigawatt levels. Its compact footprint - 100 MWe on less than five acres — provides "unmatched site flexibility and optimal land utilisation, far surpassing solar, wind, and conventional nuclear solutions", Aalo claims.

The company said it expects to be able to deliver an Aalo Pod "within 12 months from order placement and a few months for each additional pod".

"We believe that to address today’s massive data centre market demand, another category of nuclear reactor is needed, one that blends the benefit of the factory manufacturing of microreactors, the power levels of small modular reactors, and the economic targets of a large reactor," said Aalo Atomics CEO Matt Loszak. “We call this category XMR, with the 'X' representing extra flexibility and modularity."

Last year, Aalo announced it had completed the conceptual design of the Aalo-1 - a factory-fabricated 10 MWe sodium-cooled microreactor using uranium zirconium hydride fuel elements. It is working on the construction of a non-nuclear test reactor (Aalo-0), at its Austin headquarters, and plans to build its first nuclear reactor - the Aalo Experimental reactor (Aalo-X) - at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) as part of its phased approach to development and deployment.

The launch of the Aalo Pod came as Aalo unveiled the first non-nuclear prototype of its Aalo-1 reactor, as well as a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Austin. 

In December, Aalo announced that it had received official approval from the US Department of Energy (DOE) Idaho Operations Office to pursue DOE authorisation to locate its Aalo-X experimental reactor at the INL site. DOE granted the company a Siting Memorandum of Understanding earlier last year.

Aalo has signed a memorandum of understanding with Idaho Falls Power that sets the stage for the deployment of seven Aalo-1 reactors, totaling 75 MWe of power generation.

Aalo was also recently selected as one of four partners to develop up to 1 GW of nuclear energy generation capacity at the Texas A&M Rellis Campus.

"We are aiming to do for nuclear reactors what Henry Ford did for cars," Loszak said. "Currently, many utilities are shying away from building large nuclear plants because of the uncertainty in cost and schedule. By making reactors in factories, we make the process fast, repeatable, and predictable, decreasing costs without sacrificing quality or safety."