NuScale Power (SMR) surged over 10% on April 30, 2026, riding a wave of enthusiasm that swept through the nuclear sector after Amazon announced three new deals to back small modular reactor projects — including a $500 million investment in rival X-energy.
NuScale Power Corporation, SMR
NuScale was not named in any of Amazon’s plans. The stock moved anyway.
That says something about the current mood in the SMR space. When big tech writes a nine-figure check for clean energy, the whole sector feels it. Traders piled into nuclear names across the board.
The move was amplified by a short squeeze. NuScale has been a heavily shorted stock, and as prices climbed, bearish investors were forced to buy back their positions. That buying pressure pushed the stock even higher.
At its current market cap of around $3.88 billion, NuScale sits in an interesting spot. Rival Oklo — also a pure-play SMR company — trades at nearly three times that valuation. NuScale has been down more than 20% year-to-date before Wednesday’s jump.
One thing that sets NuScale apart: it is the only U.S. company with an SMR design that has been certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. That regulatory milestone took years to achieve and is not easily replicated. In a sector still working to prove itself, that distinction matters.
Still, Bank of America analysts note that meaningful SMR adoption isn’t expected until 2030 or 2035. The technology is real. The market is not yet.
NuScale’s approach focuses on utility-scale deployments. That puts it in a different lane from Oklo, which targets smaller, more bespoke installations — like powering individual data center campuses. Both strategies are legitimate. Neither is proven at scale.
The broader nuclear opportunity, according to Bank of America, could be worth around $10 trillion over the next 30 years. Within that, one study puts the SMR-specific market at $1.5 trillion. Even a modest slice of that would represent enormous upside from NuScale’s current valuation.
One analyst framed it this way: a 2,000% gain from here would still put NuScale’s market cap well under $100 billion.
But that kind of return would require everything to go right — AI data center demand continuing to grow, nuclear winning a meaningful share of that demand, SMRs gaining real-world traction, and NuScale’s grid-scale design emerging as a leading option. That is a long chain of assumptions.
The average daily trading volume on SMR runs around 27 million shares, reflecting how actively watched this name is. Technical signals heading into the week were pointing to a sell, making Wednesday’s spike all the more striking.
NuScale’s year-to-date performance remains negative even after the pop, with the stock off roughly 20% heading into April’s final session.
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