A warehouse just off Interstate 35 in Georgetown could soon become ground zero for a new kind of nuclear power plant, one built on an assembly line rather than poured in place over a decade. Aalo Atomics, an Austin-based nuclear engineering company, plans a $25 million advanced manufacturing facility at 4813 N. I-35, renovating an existing 204,350-square-foot one-story warehouse into lab, machine-shop and production-floor space.
According to Community Impact, Aalo plans to expand its advanced manufacturing operations to Georgetown, per a filing tied to the project. The project's estimated timeline runs from Nov. 15 through Jan. 30, 2028, and the site is expected to provide lab, machine-shop and production-floor space for the company's work, according to permit details reported by communityimpact.com.
A Reactor Built Like a Product, Not a Power Plant
Aalo Atomics was founded in 2023 and designs and builds small, factory-made nuclear power plants, according to the seed report from Community Impact. The pitch is speed: while traditional nuclear plants can take a decade to construct, Aalo builds compact reactors in a factory and ships them to wherever power is needed, per the same account. The company intends its plants primarily to power artificial intelligence data centers, which have become one of the country's fastest-growing sources of electricity demand.
Aalo says its designs will be optimized for simplicity, manufacturability and technological readiness, according to aalo.com. The company has described itself as a nuclear engineering company created to make reactor deployment highly predictable and economical, and it says its mass-manufacturing approach is meant to unlock cost reduction through scale, according to the company's own site.
Critical Test Reactor Reached Chain Reaction in Under Eight Months
The Georgetown project follows a milestone Aalo announced this summer: the company says it brought a commercial-scale advanced reactor to criticality on July 4 at 12:20 a.m. Mountain Time. Aalo Atomics successfully started a self-sustaining nuclear reaction with its Critical Test Reactor, according to the company's website, and the reactor was built in less than eight months from groundbreaking to sustained chain reaction.
The Critical Test Reactor includes a full-scale core demonstrating the nuclear components of Aalo's planned 10 MWe reactors, aalo.com states, and the company says the CTR can safely run and generate energy. Aalo has said it plans to deploy those 10 MWe reactors inside 50 MWe Aalo Pods, which it describes as fully modular nuclear plants purpose-built for AI data centers. The company's ultimate aim, according to its own statements, is to mass-produce Aalo Pods to supply constant, clean electricity to AI data centers.
Betting on Scale to Cut Costs
Aalo has said it is expanding into a one-million-square-foot factory to apply assembly-line manufacturing to reactor production, a step beyond the smaller Georgetown site now moving through the permitting process. The company has also said its first reactor was fabricated in Austin and turned on in Idaho, and it has set a target of reaching 3 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity costs while maintaining safety, according to aalo.com.
Nuclear reactors provide energy by splitting atoms rather than burning fossil fuels, a process that releases no greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, per Community Impact's reporting. That framing has become part of the broader pitch from companies chasing compact, factory-built reactors: the Idaho National Laboratory describes microreactors generally as factory-built and transportable, with potential uses including process heat for manufacturing, mining and industry, according to inl.gov. Other companies are chasing similar ground; Radiant has said it plans to roll out its first factory-built portable nuclear generator by 2028, according to radiantnuclear.com, while Rolls-Royce has marketed its own small modular reactor as a factory-built, fully integrated nuclear solution using commercially available technology, per rolls-royce.com.
For now, the Georgetown facility remains in the planning stages, with an estimated project window stretching into early 2028. As Aalo works to translate its Idaho test reactor into a repeatable factory product, the North I-35 warehouse could become one of the company's key manufacturing sites for reactors meant to feed the region's growing appetite for AI-driven power demand.
