Nano Nuclear Energy (NNE) CEO James Walker joins Market on Close following news of its MOU with Supermicro (SMCI) to power AI data centers. He explains the differences between the "Homer Simpson" sized nuclear sites versus micro-reactors which are in greater demand as AI requires larger energy demands. James addresses the safety concerns around nuclear energy and explains why micro-reactors have added safeguards to prevent meltdowns. He adds how easily the technology is to mass deploy calling it "an exciting transformation" in the space.
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What James Walker said
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James Walker, CEO of Nano Nuclear Energy, said AI-driven power demand could be the real bottleneck for the tech industry, requiring trillions of dollars in grid upgrades that are unlikely to be completed in time. He argued nuclear power, especially microreactors, offers a solution because it provides high base load power, can operate off-grid, and has zero carbon emissions. Walker explained microreactors range from 20 megawatts electric up to 400 megawatts for small modular reactors, and they can be deployed more quickly and safely than traditional large reactors, using advanced fuel that prevents meltdowns. He highlighted a new partnership with Super Micro to offer combined power and AI infrastructure packages, targeting remote AI inference centers and edge computing. Walker said Nano is in conversations with big tech companies and also aims to serve defense agencies, mining companies, and island nations, with a long-term vision of autonomous AI industrial campuses and sovereign national AI infrastructure.
Key takeaways
AI-driven power demand may be the real bottleneck for the tech industry, requiring trillions of dollars in grid upgrades that are unlikely to be completed in time.
Microreactors range from 20 megawatts electric up to 400 megawatts for small modular reactors, and can be deployed more quickly and safely than traditional large reactors.
Nano Nuclear's partnership with Super Micro aims to offer combined power and AI infrastructure packages, including remote AI inference centers and edge computing.
Nano is in conversations with all big tech companies, and also targets defense agencies, mining companies, and island nations as early customers.
As Nano Nuclear announced a new partnership with Super Micro this week to develop power solutions for data centers. To discuss this partnership, let's welcome in our next guest joining us, James Walker, the CEO of Nano Nuclear Energy. James, great to have you with us. Now, we've talked all about this AI boom. It's largely framed as a semiconductor and software story, but now we are increasingly talking about the potential bottleneck that is this need for energy to power all of these data centers. How quickly is AI-driven power demand becoming a defining issue for the industry?
Well, it might be the real bottleneck that comes up. I mean, I know obviously there's a demand for chips and all these different minerals and materials that are necessary for these centers, but ultimately if you want to be able to output the sort of power that's projected to be needed for the tech industry, for data centers, for AI, for edge computing, you need trillions of dollars of infrastructure upgrades to get the US grid to a point where it could output that kind of necessary power. And it's unlikely we're going to build up the grid to that necessary level in time. So the solution that a lot of the tech companies are turning towards is nuclear because it's high base load power. It can be off-grid. It can be behind the meter. It's zero carbon emissions. It meets a lot of the requirements and it derisks the tech industry substantially.
And why do you believe that micro reactors are uniquely positioned to solve this potential problem? And also for our viewers who aren't as familiar, could you also just explain what a micro reactor is?
Yeah, absolutely. So, everyone's probably very familiar with the big Homer Simpson reactor system. You know, these gigawatt power systems, but historically those have struggled because very long construction times which leads to cost overruns, time delays. The industry has kind of moved towards a smaller, more compact system that can be sort of broken down and modularized and the modular pieces can be shipped to site as the video is showing now and assembled at site and you have a quicker deployment timeline. And the nice part about these things is they scale. So you can for the reactors that you're seeing online now, you can put one or 10 or 100 reactors on site and you can just keep increasing the numbers. And a lot of the infrastructure overlap allows you to do that without linearly increasing cost. The cost actually comes down substantially the more reactors you put at site. But so a micro reactor really is anything from about 20 megawatt electric. Now there's larger systems like small modular reactors that is really 20 megawatt electric all the way up to 400 megawatt electric. But it's these smaller systems that the industry is gravitating towards because they look to be the solution for the industry to deploy nuclear much more readily, much more quickly, and avoid a lot of the pitfalls of big nuclear has experienced in the past.
And you mentioned those pitfalls, and I'm glad you also brought up the Simpsons because I think a lot of us think of that hyperbola shape as nuclear power, but micro reactors very different. How do they address some of those safety concerns? You've already addressed the timeline of construction etc. but some of the public perception around it, how are micro reactors going to address some of those concerns?
It's a good question. And for instance with a big conventional power system, I think the worst accident scenario that's ever occurred in the US was Three Mile Island. Recently in Japan you saw Fukushima. Now these were conventional reactor systems and they suffered a core melt for different reasons, loss of coolant or things like that. But the advanced reactor systems utilize a new form of fuel where all the fuel is sort of pelletized and contained and it has its own containment system. Now what this allows for is the fact that the fuel can never really reach a point at temperature where it can have that meltdown incident. So your reactor could break for a condition or whatever but you're not going to get a big radiation dose. And to give you an understanding of the confidence in that, our reactor that we're building at the moment is being built at University of Illinois in the middle of a campus. And the reason why is that there's no accident scenario that allows for a radiation leak that's dangerous to anybody. So it's a very new generation of technologies that is providing something that's very novel, that's not been seen before. And so that's what the public needs to understand. It's nuclear, but it's not nuclear like they've seen it before. It's nuclear in a safer way that it's ever been deployed. And it can be mass deployed into areas that we've never seen it deployed before. Remote communities, military bases, data centers, university campuses. It's a very different prospect. It's actually quite exciting and transformational.
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Walker, J. (2026, May 8). NNE CEO on AI Driven Power Demand [Interview transcript]. Schwab Network. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1170537/
MLA
James Walker. "NNE CEO on AI Driven Power Demand." Schwab Network, 8 May. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1170537/.
BibTeX
@misc{walker2026_1170537,
author = {James Walker},
title = {NNE CEO on AI Driven Power Demand},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Schwab Network. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {may},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1170537/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
