Is Oklo a Millionaire Maker, or Is the Hype Overdone?

Oklo (NYSE: OKLO) is finally having the moment investors have been waiting for.

On Friday, Aug. 7, Oklo reported its first-ever quarterly revenue. Although it also reported a wider-than-expected net loss of about $48.5 million, Oklo managed to rake in $1.21 million in revenue, up from none a year earlier. Operating expenses soared to about $74 million, but the balance sheet had $3 billion in total liquidity.

Furthermore, Oklo's Groves Reactor, a test reactor, achieved first criticality, meaning it sustained a controlled nuclear chain reaction for the first time.

At the time of this writing -- about 12:10 p.m. ET on Aug. 7 -- Oklo has popped over 14% on the news. If this gain holds through the closing bell, it would trim Oklo's 2026 loss to roughly 34%.

A million and some change in revenue is a meaningful change from zero last year, but does it really justify a 13% pop in the stock? In other words, is Oklo still riding on hype, or are we witnessing the salad days of a millionaire maker in the making?

Oklo is turning hype into progress

Oklo is building three businesses at once. The first is small nuclear reactors; the second is fuel fabrication and recycling; and the third is isotopes. Oklo's small nuclear reactors -- called Aurora powerhouses -- are being designed for commercial deployment, while its isotope business will address a need for scarce radioactive materials.

Together, these three businesses could turn Oklo's meager $1 million in quarterly revenue today into multibillions. Just as an illustration, a 75-megawatt (MW) reactor with an average electricity price of $100 per megawatt-hour and operating at 90% capacity would generate about $59 million in annual revenue, or about $15 million quarterly. Around 17 of these reactors would therefore produce roughly $1 billion a year.

Image source: The Motley Fool.

Oklo has previously disclosed roughly 18 gigawatts (GW) of potential demand for Aurora. Using the assumptions above, 18 GW would generate about $14 billion in annual revenue.

On those, and similar back-of-the-envelope calculations, rests the most bullish case for Oklo. Indeed, as its reactor designs advance through the regulatory process, the argument that Oklo is all hype is getting harder and harder to defend.

Oklo still faces a commercialization problem, though. The pre-commercial status of its Aurora powerhouse makes it difficult to validate its economics. How much will they cost to build and deploy? Will they be considerably profitable, or just a little? And will there be as much demand for nuclear power in the future as we're expecting today?

In short, Oklo is undergoing a transformation -- slow, but steady. My only hesitation is that the stock's valuation is moving a lot quicker than the business. If we simply annualized its quarterly revenue of $1.2 million, then Oklo's roughly $8 billion market cap would value the company at more than 1,700 times sales. That calculation is admittedly flawed, since most of this quarter's revenue came from businesses acquired in June, but still, it illustrates just how much future growth is built into the stock.

Oklo might be an exciting play on AI energy for some, but for the more risk-intolerant, a nuclear exchange-traded fund (ETF) might be the safer bet.

Steven Porrello has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.