A Gulf Sovereign Fund Is Betting on Nuclear Powered AI Infrastructure

Every few months, a story surfaces that reframes how seriously the AI industry is treating its own power problem. This is one of them. Crusoe, a US artificial intelligence infrastructure company in which Oman Investment Authority retains a stake, is preparing to pilot a nuclear powered data centre, and the fact that a Gulf sovereign wealth fund sits inside this story is worth pausing on before getting to the technical detail.

Crusoe is partnering with Austin based Aalo Atomics to pair a modular data centre with an advanced nuclear reactor at Idaho National Laboratory, targeting 2027 for the proof of concept. Aalo will initially power a Crusoe Spark modular data centre running the Crusoe Cloud platform, testing whether nuclear energy can reliably support the kind of power intensive AI workloads that are increasingly straining conventional grid capacity.

The technology itself is called an Aalo Pod, a modular fifty megawatt power plant built from five smaller ten megawatt reactors operating through shared electricity generation systems, designed specifically as a power source for data centres and other large scale electricity users. Aalo's test reactor at Idaho National Laboratory, known as Aalo X, completed a zero power fuelled criticality demonstration on the fourth of July, becoming the fourth advanced reactor authorised by the US Department of Energy to reach that milestone under its Reactor Pilot Programme. Criticality confirms a sustained nuclear chain reaction, though it is worth being precise here, it does not mean the unit is generating commercial electricity yet. Full power operation is the next stage, and Aalo has already begun work on a second, commercial scale reactor alongside it.

If the pilot succeeds, Crusoe and Aalo intend to deploy fifty megawatt Aalo Pods across Crusoe's wider data centre footprint by the end of 2029. That remains a stated commercial ambition rather than a confirmed build programme, and any broader rollout will still depend on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission's separate licensing process, currently at the pre application stage for Aalo's proposed Idaho Nuclear Project.

Oman Investment Authority first invested in Crusoe back in 2022, alongside Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company, as part of a 350 million dollar Series C funding round. OIA has since completed a partial exit from that position, reporting an annual internal rate of return of 68 percent and a return of 10.3 times its invested capital, a genuinely strong outcome by any sovereign fund's standards. It retained part of its holding specifically to participate in the company's continued growth, and Crusoe was most recently valued at more than 10 billion dollars following the initial closing of a 1.375 billion dollar Series E round in October 2025.

It is worth being precise about what this story is and is not. No facility in Oman is part of this nuclear pilot, and OIA has announced no additional capital commitment tied specifically to the Aalo partnership. The exposure here is financial rather than physical, a Gulf sovereign fund holding equity in a company now testing one of the more consequential bets in AI infrastructure, not a Gulf based nuclear data centre.

Crusoe disclosed in June that it had already contracted 4.9 gigawatts of AI infrastructure across its data centre developments and cloud business, with a wider development pipeline exceeding 40 gigawatts. Numbers at that scale are precisely why nuclear power has moved from a fringe idea to a serious line of enquiry for AI infrastructure operators. Conventional grid capacity in many markets simply was not built to absorb demand growth of this magnitude on this timeline, and data centre operators are increasingly exploring dedicated, co located power generation rather than waiting on grid expansion that may take a decade or more.

For a region investing heavily in its own sovereign AI infrastructure, this story matters less for what it builds in Idaho and more for what it signals about where AI capital is flowing next. Gulf sovereign wealth funds have spent the past several years positioning themselves early in the AI infrastructure buildout, from chip supply to data centre operators to now, evidently, the energy layer beneath them, a trajectory that runs in parallel to the UAE's own push to shape the rules governing that buildout from the inside, reflected in its confirmed role co-chairing the 2027 Geneva AI summit ahead of hosting the 2028 edition. The nuclear pilot itself will take years to prove out, licence and scale, but the fact that Gulf capital already has a seat at that table, years before commercial deployment, tells you something about how far ahead regional sovereign funds are thinking about the AI buildout's next constraint.