Shares of Oklo (NYSE: OKLO) surged 13% to $40.37 in Thursday morning trading, while NuScale Power (NYSE: SMR) climbed 10% to $9.14 following a House vote targeting data center electricity costs.
The House of Representatives passed the Ratepayer Protection Act by a near-unanimous margin, requiring large data centers to pay for the power generation and transmission upgrades their electricity demand creates, rather than spreading those costs across other utility customers.
Both reactor developers outpaced the broader market by a significant margin, with the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA: SPY) rising just 1% to $762.04 on the same session.
The Global X Uranium ETF (NYSEARCA: URA) gained 4% to $42.92, but that figure trails both developer stocks by a wide margin, suggesting the market is not yet pricing in a full supply chain buildout.
That divergence is meaningful, because if the vote genuinely signaled that more reactors would be built, uranium miners and fuel producers would logically move alongside the builders rather than lagging them substantially.
The plausible mechanism connecting the legislation to Oklo and NuScale Power is direct: a data center operator forced to bear the full cost of grid upgrades has a stronger financial incentive to pursue dedicated on-site generation, which is precisely the product both companies are developing.
Oklo’s bull case is anchored by a 12 GW master power agreement with Switch and a 500 MW letter of intent with Equinix that included a $25 million pre-payment, both of which represent exactly the kind of hyperscale customer the Ratepayer Protection Act would push toward securing their own power supply.
A key complication for Oklo is timing, as the company targets first commercial power delivery in late 2027 to early 2028, meaning any demand created by the legislation in the near term cannot be served by reactors that have not yet been built.
Oklo remains pre-revenue in its core reactor business, and today’s 13% gain recovers only a portion of a much steeper decline, with the stock still down 44% year to date heading into Thursday’s session.
NuScale Power carries a somewhat different profile, holding $1.9 billion in cash and investments at the end of Q2 2026 after raising fresh equity earlier this year, giving the company a balance sheet runway that earlier-stage peers do not currently enjoy.
NuScale Power is also the only U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission design-certified small modular reactor technology provider, a distinction that positions it uniquely as policy and procurement conversations accelerate among hyperscale power buyers.
A major growth catalyst for NuScale Power centers on ENTRA1 Energy advancing discussions with TVA toward a definitive power purchase agreement for up to 6 GW of NuScale Power capacity, described as potentially the largest nuclear deployment program in U.S. history.
Despite Thursday’s rally, NuScale Power stock remains down 36% year to date and is trading near its 50-day moving average of $9.06, underscoring that the underlying operating story has not materially changed in a single session.
The Ratepayer Protection Act still requires Senate passage and subsequent rulemaking by state regulators before its requirements take effect, leaving substantial legislative uncertainty ahead for both companies.
Investors considering exposure to either name should weigh the fact that both Oklo and NuScale Power remain policy-sensitive, pre-revenue developer equities that can lead the nuclear complex sharply higher on headline days and give back gains just as quickly when legislative momentum stalls.
