A company called Valar Atomics is trying to raise $1 billion from investors, which would value the company at about $6 billion, according to three people familiar with the situation. The venture capital firm Sequoia is expected to lead the deal. The Information first reported the talks on July 16, and TechCrunch confirmed the details on July 17. Both Sequoia and Valar Atomics declined to comment.

Valar Atomics is based in El Segundo, California, and is three years old. In March 2026, the company raised $450 million at a $2 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. That round made it one of roughly 90 new "unicorns" — private companies valued at $1 billion or more — created in the first half of 2026, as tracked by TechCrunch. If the current talks close at the reported terms, the company's valuation will have tripled in about four months.

Valar is led by CEO Isaiah Taylor. The company is building a new kind of nuclear reactor called a small modular reactor, or SMR. Traditional nuclear plants are massive projects that take over a decade and billions of dollars to build. SMRs are designed to be much smaller, potentially built in factories and trucked to where they are needed. Valar's specific design uses helium gas to cool the reactor instead of water, and runs at higher temperatures than conventional reactors. The company plans to eventually build hundreds of these reactors to power data centers — the large facilities packed with servers that run online services and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.

Valar's investors include Palmer Luckey, who founded the defense technology company Anduril, and Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, a data analytics firm. An early funding round was led by Riot Ventures, according to the company's own records.

Earlier in July 2026, Valar showed its nuclear reactor sending power directly to an AI chip made by Nvidia, the leading maker of the specialized processors used in artificial intelligence. The two companies have announced a partnership to explore using nuclear energy to power future AI data centers. The connection between a nuclear reactor startup and the biggest name in AI chips puts Valar at the meeting point of two huge and expensive trends: building more AI computing power, and finding clean, reliable energy sources to run it.

This wave of investment in nuclear startups is happening against a regulatory backdrop. Valar Atomics has joined several states and competing startups in a lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. government agency that oversees nuclear energy. The company argues that the agency is applying overly long licensing processes to small test reactors. The outcome of that lawsuit could significantly affect how quickly companies like Valar can move from demonstrations to actual commercial reactors that are up and running.

In my view, what stands out is how fast the valuation has climbed. Going from $2 billion to $6 billion in four months for a company that is three years old and has not yet built a commercial reactor tells you something about investor confidence. Investors appear to believe that the major companies running AI systems need so much power, so urgently, that they will pay a premium for any realistic nuclear option. Sequoia's expected role in leading the round adds weight to that belief. It also suggests that investors are starting to treat nuclear energy the way they have treated cloud computing and AI companies — not as a slow-moving regulated utility, but as a technology with growth potential in a market where supply is limited.

The technical design is relevant to that thinking. Valar's helium-cooled reactors are more thermally efficient than today's water-cooled reactors and avoid some of the engineering challenges of using liquid metal as a coolant. For a data center, being able to provide both electricity and high-temperature heat, using a coolant that does not react chemically with other materials and does not require water under pressure, is a real advantage. Whether Valar's design can pass regulatory review and reach commercial deployment at the scale its investors are betting on is the central open question.

The lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the clearest sign that Valar's leadership sees government rules, not the physics of the reactor, as the main obstacle. If the lawsuit succeeds in reducing licensing requirements for test reactors, it could shorten the path from demonstration to real deployment — not just for Valar, but for other advanced reactor companies as well.

The talks are not yet final. Valuation figures and investor roles in private funding discussions can change before deals close. But taken together — a demonstrated nuclear-to-AI-chip power connection, a partnership with Nvidia, a Sequoia-led round at a tripled valuation, and an active legal challenge against the federal regulator — the picture is clear: money is flowing aggressively toward nuclear energy as a way to power AI, and Valar Atomics has positioned itself to capture a significant share of that momentum.