Friday File: Looking back at NVIDIA

I’m getting the Friday File to you a little early this week, because today’s the day we lend a University our youngest child (youngest by just a few minutes, he’d remind me — his “older” twin brother will be restarting the cycle of tears and goodbyes for us next week). It’s a wistful time to be typing these words, because the very first articles I wrote when I started Stock Gumshoe were composed with these two infants asleep on my lap. It’s been an amazing 18 years so far.

But you don’t care much about that, I’m sure, so let’s talk about investing for a moment.

I’ve got nuclear power on the brain this week, thanks to our look at the latest BWX Technologies (BWXT) teaser yesterday, so we’ll start in that sector…

Alphabet (GOOGL, GOOG) and Kairos have chosen a location for their first planned small modular reactor (SMR), it will be built in Tennessee in partnership with the Tennessee Valley Authority… which has gotten pretty active in SMRs (they’re also planning to build at least one of their own, using the GE-Vernova BWXR-300 design).  This is both good news, as site selection and permitting is a key step that not a lot of SMR companies have reached, and a reminder that this first wave of SMRs is probably going to manifest pretty slowly, even with the most recent executive orders that are designed to speed up and spur permitting and licensing for new reactors.

This deal is for the Hermes 2 demonstration reactor in Oak Ridge, which Kairos hopes to have in operation by 2030 — that’s a very small reactor, 50MW, which would actually generate electricity to send to the grid (unlike Hermes 1, currently under construction at the same location, which is the non-power demonstration reactor that they still hope to have completed by 2027). Much of that power will go to Alphabet, which is sponsoring the project in order to backstop the power demands of its data centers in the region. The Tennessee Valley Authority’s more ambitious BWRX-300 project (that’s a 300MW reactor) planned for Clinch River is being talked about as an “operational as soon as 2032 if all goes well” project, but is also just beginning permitting and licensing.

For context, that little Pele microreactor from BWXT that we talked about yesterday has about 1.5MW of electrical output… and most modern …