Nano Nuclear Energy (NNE) CEO James Walker joins Trading 360 to discuss how the AI and data center buildout is creating new demand for reliable nuclear power. Walker explains how the company’s microreactors could help address growing electricity needs, including through a partnership with Tillman Digital Gateway targeting 6 GW of power over the next decade. He also discusses how newer reactor designs could allow deployment closer to urban areas while improving safety compared with earlier generations.
Segment originally aired Friday, August 28, 2026.
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What James Walker said
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James Walker, CEO of NANO Nuclear Energy, described his company as a leader in microreactor systems, the only U.S. microreactor company to have submitted a construction permit application. He discussed a partnership with Tillman to connect NANO's nuclear tech with gigawatt-scale AI data center campuses, targeting two gigawatts of capacity by mid-2030s and six gigawatts by 2040. Walker emphasized the inherent safety of new reactor technology, citing a worst-case radiation dose equivalent to a banana, and noted the University of Illinois reactor project. He argued that licensing is not the bottleneck; mass production infrastructure is. He predicted nuclear deployment will expand to vertical farms, desalination, military bases, and space, with 400 gigawatts of additional nuclear power projected by 2040-2050, largely for data centers, benefiting consumers by avoiding utility bill increases.
Key takeaways
NANO Nuclear is the only U.S. microreactor company to have submitted a construction permit application.
Partnership with Tillman targets two gigawatts of advanced nuclear capacity by mid-2030s and six gigawatts by 2040.
Projected 400 gigawatts of additional nuclear power by 2040-2050, largely for data centers.
nuclear reactors at U.S. AI data centers. Joining us now to discuss that and more is the CEO and head of reactor development at NANO Nuclear Energy, Mr. James Walker. So hey, first off, happy Friday. Thanks for joining us, James. Before we get into the news, I want to spend plenty of time discussing this and this really incredible partnership that you guys are announcing. But I also want to make sure our viewers are familiar with your company, with your business, if you want to give us a kind of elevator pitch on what you guys do.
Sure, we're very happy to, and look, happy Friday to you, too. We're an advanced reactor company. We specialize in microreactor systems. So just think of your Homer Simpson reactor, but shrunken down to a very small scale, and being able to deploy nuclear energy in ways it's never been deployed before: oil and gas sites, mining sites, remote communities, island communities, military bases, data centers, AI. That's the future of nuclear, and that's what we're involved in. We're one of the leaders in this space. I think we're the only microreactor company, actually, in the United States that has submitted a construction permit application. And we're diverse. We're involved in fuel transportation, nuclear fuel facilities, but it's all ultimately to build out our capability to mass-manufacture these microreactor systems to cater to the commercial demand for them.
But one of the big demand sources is that data center, that tech industry. Yeah. And we know that there's bottlenecks all over the place with those data center build-outs, and one of them is access to power. And that's where you and your team come in. Talk to us about this recently announced partnership and what that means for not only your business, but this industry as a whole.
You're right. So this is the problem I think the tech industry is facing. Even AI's growth is increasingly constrained by access to reliable power. And the more power it needs, the more it's kicking up utility bills, the more it wants to be out of sight, out of mind, off-grid. And if we add nuclear, it's arriving at a point of technology sophistication where it can provide that baseload power, be offsite, and solve a lot of the tech industry's problems, bottlenecks with power, getting away from grids and pushing up utility bills, that kind of thing. Now, this partnership with NANO and Tillman, this is designed to connect NANO's advanced nuclear tech with Tillman's pipeline of gigawatt-scale AI and hyperscale data center campuses. So we're already targeting something like two gigawatts of advanced nuclear capacity for tech in partnership with Tillman by about the mid-2030s, and by about 2040, somewhere in the region of about six gigawatts is being targeted between us.
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Walker, J. (2026, August 29). Nano Nuclear Energy (NNE) CEO on Role in Data Centers, Power Partnerships [Interview transcript]. Schwab Network. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1278951/
MLA
James Walker. "Nano Nuclear Energy (NNE) CEO on Role in Data Centers, Power Partnerships." Schwab Network, 29 Aug. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1278951/.
BibTeX
@misc{walker2026_1278951,
author = {James Walker},
title = {Nano Nuclear Energy (NNE) CEO on Role in Data Centers, Power Partnerships},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Schwab Network. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {aug},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1278951/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
