Two New Nuclear and Geothermal Companies Just Went Public—Here's Why It Matters

A nuclear power company called X-energy went public this week and raised $1 billion. On its first day of trading, its stock price jumped 25 percent. Around the same time, a geothermal energy company called Fervo announced plans to go public too.

This matters because climate and clean energy companies have largely stayed away from public stock markets for the past few years. These two debuts signal that investors are starting to get interested again.

What These Companies Actually Do

X-energy builds advanced nuclear reactors. Think of these as smaller, safer cousins of traditional nuclear power plants—they don't take up as much space and can do more than just generate electricity. They can also provide intense heat for manufacturing things like steel or chemicals.

Fervo develops geothermal energy, which taps heat from deep underground to make electricity. Their technique borrows drilling methods from the oil industry to reach hot rock in places where geothermal power wasn't previously possible.

Both companies count big names like Amazon and Microsoft among their supporters. These tech companies need enormous amounts of electricity to run their data centers and AI systems, and they want that power to be clean and reliable.

Why Big Tech Companies Care

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all have a problem: they need more electricity than ever before, and they want it to come from sources that don't produce carbon emissions.

Renewable energy like solar and wind helps, but these sources only work when the sun shines or the wind blows. A nuclear or geothermal plant, by contrast, produces steady power 24 hours a day. Tech companies have started signing long-term contracts—essentially promising to buy power from these plants for decades—which gives the companies a way to guarantee they'll earn money.

This kind of guaranteed income is attractive to investors. It means a company can predict its revenue far into the future, much like a utility company can.

The Shift From Venture Capital to Public Markets

For years, clean energy companies relied on venture capital—investment from specialized firms focused on young, high-growth companies. But nuclear and geothermal projects take decades to build and operate, which doesn't fit venture capital's typical playbook. Venture firms usually want to see profits and exits much faster.

Public stock markets, by contrast, have investors who are comfortable waiting for long-term payoffs. They are also much larger pools of money—the kind needed to fund projects that cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

X-energy's billion-dollar raise was possible only because it went public. A venture capital fund alone couldn't provide that much cash and wait 20 or 30 years for returns.

What Changed to Make This Happen

Last year, investors poured about $6.5 billion into climate tech companies overall. But the money flowed mainly toward infrastructure plays—grids, batteries, power plants, and transmission lines—rather than experimental lab projects. These are businesses that already know how to make money.

This focus on mature technologies reflects a hard lesson from the past. In the early 2000s, solar and wind companies went public while they were still inventing themselves. When their technology didn't perform as well as promised, or when manufacturing costs didn't drop as fast as expected, their stock prices crashed.

The companies going public now are different. X-energy and Fervo have already built and operated working systems. They have signed contracts with real customers. Their supply chains exist. They've moved past the "will this work?" phase and into the "how do we build more of these?" phase.

Federal Support and Energy Security

A second factor helped clear the way: the U.S. government. Federal tax credits and production incentives have improved the economics of clean energy projects across multiple technologies. New laws have also streamlined the approval process for advanced nuclear designs.

Energy security has also become a priority for many countries. Nuclear and geothermal plants produce power domestically, which insulates a country from fluctuating oil and gas prices or supply shocks from overseas—a lesson the world learned during recent energy crises.

What Comes Next

If X-energy and Fervo's debuts go well, other climate infrastructure companies may follow them to public markets. Energy storage companies, transmission operators, and renewable fuel producers are all watching to see how the market receives these long-term, infrastructure-heavy business models.

The broader context here is one of sector maturation. We have seen this pattern before, in the 1990s, when internet infrastructure companies like fiber networks and data centers first attracted institutional capital. When an industry moves from venture-backed experimentation to deploying infrastructure at scale, it usually means the core technology is no longer the risky part—execution and capital are.

That doesn't mean everything will go smoothly. Advanced nuclear projects are complex, geothermal drilling can encounter unexpected geology, and regulatory approvals can take longer than planned. But the fact that public markets are now willing to bet on these businesses suggests investors believe the climate tech sector has crossed an important threshold.