X-energy stock is up 27% in the first day of trading following the high-profile IPO

The lowest price of X-energy shares today Nasdaq debutopened at $30.11 before closing at $29.20, up 27% from its initial offering of $23 per share.

Investors can’t get enough of nuclear power, apparently. Although the share price was revised from $16 to $19 target the company floated on the earnings call. Recently, the company was valued at $11.5 billion.

Just five years ago, such enthusiasm for developing nuclear weapons would have surprised many people.

Back then, the nuclear industry was hit hard by project delays and recent price increases for completed power plants. Two power plants were completed in Georgia – one in the late 2010s and the other in the early 2020s. All in all, it cost about 30 billion dollars to build.

Nuclear weapons in the early 2020s were in their infancy, and one leader was facing major regulatory challengesraising fears that the industry has not been able to put the past behind it.

Now, investors seem optimistic that X-force and its partners will find a way to deal with the problem.

High speed can be followed by AI driven data center boom. GPUs require a lot of electricity, and while solar, wind, batteries, and natural gas have been meeting the needs these days, tech companies have been hoping to diversify. Nuclear power is one of the many things they have been researching, and I hope that the compact form factor will be suitable for their data center.

Nuclear power has the potential to add more power to the US grid than it has ever been able to supply. Today, about 18% of the country’s electricity comes from nuclear power. But the cost of the reactor has risen in recent years. Nuclear power may be one of the most reliable sources of electricity in the US, but it is also one of the most expensive.

X-energy’s 80-megawatt reactor design is a smaller system than many existing reactors. The company is betting that modularity can help keep costs down, and data center users expect that a single campus can be powered by a single electrical panel, providing the kind of redundancy and stability they get. Amazon has said it will buy 5 gigawatts of power from X-energy over the next decade, but chemical maker Dow will get the first electric start.

Construction is underway on the X-energy refinery, and while the company has yet to begin construction on the power plant, investors seem confident that the company can break nuclear power out of its years of trouble.