A post-90s entrepreneur, with a valuation of 10 billion yuan.
A post - 90s entrepreneur with a nearly 10 - billion - yuan valuation has emerged in the nuclear power track.
The company is called Blue Energy. Headquartered in Maryland, USA, it was founded in 2023. Jake Jurewicz, the co - founder and CEO, is a post - 90s graduate from the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT. Recently, Blue Energy announced the completion of a $380 million financing round. Its valuation is approaching 10 billion yuan. The lead investor is VXI Capital, and Engine Ventures, At One Ventures, etc. are the follow - on investors.
What underpins all this is the explosive growth of electricity demand brought about by AI and the backdrop of nuclear power re - entering the capital's field of vision after years of dormancy. A bet that was well - thought - out during his time writing a thesis at MIT is turning into a real engineering project.
The Nuclear Power Dream Emerging from the MIT Laboratory
Another post - 90s entrepreneur with a 10 - billion - yuan valuation has emerged.
Recently, the US nuclear power startup Blue Energy announced the completion of a $380 million financing round. The lead investor is VXI Capital, and Engine Ventures is a follow - on investor. Old shareholders such as At One Ventures and Tamarack Global also increased their investment in this round. According to the common valuation range of nuclear power startups, after this financing, Blue Energy's valuation is approaching 10 billion yuan. The company was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in Maryland. It focuses on prefabricated modular nuclear power plants. It has only been two years since its establishment.
What makes this particularly noteworthy is the background of the founder. Jake Jurewicz, the CEO and co - founder of Blue Energy, is a post - 90s with a master's degree in Nuclear Science and Engineering from MIT. He also obtained two bachelor's degrees in Physics and Nuclear Engineering. More interestingly, his graduation thesis at MIT studied the feasibility of building an offshore nuclear power plant in a shipyard. That is to say, what Blue Energy is doing today was, to some extent, a problem he had thought through in school. After graduating, he spent several years gaining experience in the industry. When the time was right, he put this idea into practice.
Before starting his business, Jake worked on corporate strategy at Exelon, the largest nuclear power operator in the United States, and also co - founded a company called Entropy Power, accumulating a comprehensive industry perspective from policy to business.
The nuclear power industry has extremely high thresholds. The regulatory system, technical certification, and supply - chain barriers involved in nuclear power are each sufficient to keep most entrepreneurs out. Traditional nuclear power projects often have a construction period of ten years and require billions of dollars in investment. Most of the players remaining in the industry are giants with decades of accumulation, leaving little room for startups.
This is why when a young founder from the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT approaches investors with a completely different construction logic, it attracts real attention in the industry.
Blue Energy's core judgment is that the nuclear power industry has been trapped by the problems of "slow construction" and "high cost" for too long, and the root cause of these two problems lies in the construction method itself. For traditional nuclear power plants, the process of selecting a site, laying the foundation, on - site construction, and step - by - step installation highly depends on the construction conditions of a specific location. Difficult quality control and project delays are common. Blue Energy wants to adopt a different logic, moving the construction scene of the nuclear power plant from the construction site to the shipyard. In the shipyard, prefabricated production on an assembly line can achieve standardized control, resulting in more stable quality and more predictable delivery. The company estimates that this approach can theoretically reduce the construction period of a nuclear power plant by 80%.
This idea has an additional option in the technical route, making its applicable scope wider than that of similar companies. Blue Energy's design is "reactor agnostic", which means it is not tied to a specific reactor type. Whether it is a small - scale pressurized water reactor, a molten salt reactor, or other next - generation reactor types, as long as the reactor type itself has passed regulatory certification, it can be incorporated into Blue Energy's prefabricated framework. This choice means greater flexibility in technology and not betting on the success or failure of a single technical route in business. The technological evolution path of the nuclear energy industry still has great uncertainty. Not tying to a specific reactor type is, to some extent, leaving a way out for itself.
It took Blue Energy less than two years to evolve from a research topic in an MIT laboratory to a company that has raised nearly $400 million and is ready to build nuclear power plants in batches in a shipyard.
Building Nuclear Power Plants in a Shipyard
How is the $380 million going to be spent?
Based on Blue Energy's announcements, it can be roughly inferred that the use of this round of financing is divided into three parts: purchasing long - lead - time equipment, promoting project development, and daily operations. The first part is the most urgent. There are a batch of key equipment in a nuclear power plant, and it often takes three to five years from placing an order to delivery, such as large forgings, special pumps and valves, pressure vessels, etc. If these are not locked in advance, all subsequent construction plans will be stuck. Signing the procurement contracts for this batch of equipment first is the prerequisite for making the entire project schedule truly executable.
The first stop for project implementation has been determined to be at Port Victoria, Texas. This location meets several conditions: it is close to existing power transmission lines and fiber - optic networks, has abundant natural gas pipeline resources, and has the conditions for water transportation of large - scale equipment. Blue Energy has signed a cooperation agreement with the AI infrastructure company Crusoe and plans to build a 1.5 - gigawatt nuclear - powered data center park locally. According to the schedule, this project will start construction as early as the third quarter of 2026. It will first use natural gas for power generation as a transition and then switch after the nuclear power unit is built. The target for the entire cycle from construction start to nuclear power grid connection is within 48 months. 48 months is a fraction of the construction period of a traditional nuclear power project.
This is achieved through a completely different construction logic from traditional nuclear power. Jake mentioned in a media interview that he initially came up with this idea inspired by the construction method of liquefied natural gas export terminals. He has a friend who works at Venture Global, an American LNG exporter known for cutting the construction period in half. His friend told him about Venture Global's approach, and Jake said he "suddenly understood". LNG terminals are also highly engineered large - scale energy facilities. Venture Global's core approach is to prefabricate as many modules as possible in the factory instead of building them piece by piece on - site. Although nuclear power plants and LNG terminals are very different in technology, this idea can be directly applied in terms of construction logic.
Blue Energy's specific approach is to divide the nuclear power plant into two parts: the nuclear island and the non - nuclear island. The non - nuclear part, including the steam turbine, power generation system, and cooling auxiliary system, which accounts for about 90% of the total cost, is all prefabricated on an assembly line in the shipyard and then transported to the destination by water for installation. For the nuclear island part, a key structural innovation is adopted. The reactor is placed in a large single - pile foundation. This single - pile technology is originally a mature solution for offshore wind power foundations, with a highly automated production line, low manufacturing cost, and stable quality. Placing the reactor in water also has an additional advantage. Whether there is a power outage or an extreme event, there is always an adequate supply of cooling water, greatly improving passive safety.
A key milestone was completed in early 2026 for this plan to reach its current stage. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Blue Energy's license thematic report, recognizing the company's phased approach to nuclear power plant construction, that is, building the non - nuclear part first, and the approval and construction of the nuclear part can proceed in parallel. This approval directly cuts at least five years from the more than ten - year timeline of traditional nuclear power. For potential investors and customers, this is not just a regulatory progress; it means that the entire project schedule has official endorsement and is no longer just a promise from the founder.
Building a nuclear power plant in a shipyard may sound like a metaphor, but Blue Energy is working on a real engineering project. The first 1.5 - gigawatt power station targets AI data centers. The construction site has been selected, regulatory approvals have been obtained, and this round of financing has been secured. Next, it's time to actually build it.
Nuclear Power is Entering a New Window Period
When Blue Energy received this funding, the popularity of the entire nuclear energy track needed no explanation.
In the past decade, the image of nuclear power in mainstream public opinion has been rather embarrassing. The shadow of the Fukushima accident, high construction costs, and repeatedly delayed engineering projects have associated the industry with labels such as "outdated", "dangerous", and "unprofitable" for a long time. Before 2023, investors who dared to place large bets on nuclear power startups were in the minority in the entire venture capital circle.
The turning point came from a direction that no one fully anticipated: AI.
After the emergence of ChatGPT, the electricity demand curve of data centers began to rise sharply. The electricity consumption for training a large - language model is equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of tens of thousands of households. The electricity consumption during the inference stage is continuous. Behind each user query, a batch of servers are running at high speed. The electricity procurement scale of companies such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta has multiplied in the past two years and is still accelerating. The intermittent problem of renewable energy has been magnified in this context. There is not always wind for wind power, and solar power stops at night. Data centers need 24/7 stable electricity, which is precisely the core advantage of nuclear power.
Capital and technology companies have almost simultaneously responded. Microsoft signed an agreement with the veteran nuclear power operator Constellation to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania to supply power specifically for data centers; Google signed a power purchase agreement with Kairos Power and plans to purchase electricity from a batch of small - modular reactors around 2030; Amazon has bet on multiple nuclear power startups at once. The endorsement of technology giants has re - priced the valuation logic of the entire nuclear energy track. When the customer list of a nuclear power startup includes Microsoft or Google, investors will view the matter completely differently.
Blue Energy's entry point coincides highly with this wave of demand explosion. Its first project is located in Texas, with the AI data center operator Crusoe as the customer, targeting a power supply scale of 1.5 gigawatts. What does 1.5 gigawatts mean? It is approximately equivalent to the total electricity demand of a medium - sized city, which is sufficient to support a fairly large - scale model training and inference business for an AI computing power park. An order of this magnitude would have been almost impossible to appear on the books of a two - year - old nuclear power startup two or three years ago.
Of course, the nuclear power industry is not short of good stories but lacks projects that can be implemented. In the past two decades, many nuclear power startups have presented themselves to the public with beautiful technical solutions and financing announcements but have ultimately been stuck in project delivery and made no further progress. Blue Energy is now in a state where the financing is in place, regulatory approvals have been obtained, and customer contracts have been signed. The necessary pre - project preparations are basically completed, and it is now entering the real and challenging stage of project delivery.
Whether an idea that originated from an MIT graduation thesis can turn into a real - functioning nuclear power plant on the Texas coastline will be revealed in a few years.
This article is from the WeChat official account “Rongzhong Finance” (ID: thecapital). The author is Lv Jingzhi. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.