A tiny nuclear startup just raised nearly half a billion dollars to power army bases.
Not a typo.
$470 million.
Not from the government. From venture capitalists who think the Pentagon's next power plant fits in a shipping container.
Meet Antares.
Here's the pitch that got investors writing checks:
That's not a rounding error.
That's a $370M equity + $100M debt bet that America's next war machine runs on fission, not diesel.
On June 4, Antares did something no private company had pulled off in over forty years.
Its demo reactor, the Mark-0, hit criticality at Idaho National Laboratory.
The first privately engineered non-light-water reactor to do it since the 1980s.
Stay with me — this matters.
Most SMR startups are still on paper. Antares just proved theirs actually works.
There's a deadline hanging over this entire industry.
An executive order now requires the Department of War to have a reactor running on a domestic base by September 30, 2028.
Antares is one of three finalists competing to make that happen, with test deployments planned on Air Force bases in Colorado and Montana.
First power online: 2027.
First military rollout: 2028.
That's a brutally tight runway for nuclear.
New small reactors are expected to cost around $214 per megawatt hour — pricier than almost every gas turbine on the market.
For a hospital or a factory, that math doesn't work.
For a military base that can't afford a blackout mid-mission?
It's not even a question.
That's exactly why Antares chased the Pentagon instead of the power grid.
Antares isn't alone. X-energy just IPO'd for $1 billion. Radiant, Standard Nuclear, and Last Energy all raised nine-figure rounds since December.
Data centers are hungry. The grid is strained. And suddenly, nuclear startups look less like science fiction and more like infrastructure.
Antares has now raised $604 million total.
The bet isn't just that small reactors will work.
It's that the world's most price-insensitive buyer will pay to find out first.
That's all for now!
