NANO and Tillman pencil in 6 GW of nuclear for 2040, and pay for it in NANO stock

The useful way to read the paperwork is as a placeholder in a queue. Tillman is assembling a multi-state pipeline of sites sized around the power requirements of hyperscale and AI customers ^[5], and the framework lets it attach a reactor supplier's name to those sites long before anyone has to buy a reactor. NANO's chief executive, James Walker, was plain about what his side gets, calling the framework a milestone in the company's future customer acquisition strategy and describing power availability as one of the defining constraints on continued AI infrastructure expansion ^[9].

The arithmetic is where the plan gets interesting. The reactor on offer is the KRONOS MMR, a 15 megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled unit designed for modular and phased deployment ^[7]. Two gigawatts therefore means roughly 133 of them, and 6 GW means 400 ^[15]. Phased deployment is the selling point and also the exposure: the 4 GW added between the mid-2030s and 2040 is close to a tripling of installed capacity in about five years ^[16], which works out to something like 53 reactor deliveries a year across that window ^[18]. Finding land next to a data campus is not the constraint in that sentence. Building and licensing a unit a week is.

The ownership split tells you who carries the bill and when. Tillman or its affiliates could own and finance qualifying power projects while NANO supplies reactors and fuel and supports development and operations ^[8]. That pushes the heavy capital requirement onto the developer at the far end of the schedule, well past the point at which the vendor's stock milestones would have been earned. Sachit Ahuja, Tillman's co-president, described the exercise as planning for the resilient, scalable power architecture its campuses will need for decades to come ^[12], which is a fair description of a document that obliges neither party to deliver a kilowatt.

The same logic is being exported. The companies say they are evaluating potential projects in selected international markets where Tillman already holds digital infrastructure interests ^[14], which is a reservation strategy applied to countries rather than counties.

So the story is the behaviour, not the gigawatts. A campus developer has decided that a claim on mid-2030s nuclear is worth taking out now, priced in someone else's equity, contingent on orders that may never be placed. That is a cheap option, and cheap options get copied.