Tech
Nuclear startup Valar Atomics in talks to raise new funding at $6B valuation
Valar Atomics, a startup building small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) — essentially miniaturized, factory-built power plants designed to be cheaper and faster to deploy than traditional reactors — is in talks to raise a new round of capital, according to three sources familiar with the company. The three-year-old company is seeking a valuation of about $6 billion, and Sequoia is expected to lead the deal, the people said.
The Information was the first to report the funding discussions, including that the El Segundo, California, startup is raising a $1 billion equity round.
Part of that capital has been raised previously at a lower valuation, the people told TechCrunch. Specifically, Valar has raised $450 million — including $340 million in equity and $110 million in debt — at a $2 billion valuation, per a Bloomberg report in March.
Deals structured in multiple installments at varying valuations, occasionally executed at different times, are becoming increasingly common in today’s AI-fueled fundraising environment. These deals can create the perception that capital was invested at a single, uniform valuation. In reality, investors in the same round can end up paying different prices for the same company — a distinction that matters more than ever as outsiders try to benchmark red-hot startups against one another.
Sequoia and Valar Atomics declined to comment.
Earlier this month, the company showed that its nuclear reactor provided a small amount of power to an Nvidia AI chip. Concurrently with that proof-of-concept demonstration, Valar and Nvidia announced a partnership to explore the development of nuclear energy to power future AI data centers.
Valar’s rise is playing out against a broader demand crunch. Data center electricity needs are projected to grow sharply over the next several years, and utilities in many regions are years away from adding enough new capacity. That vacuum has turned nuclear power — long plagued by cost overruns and regulatory bottlenecks — into one of the more closely watched corners of the AI infrastructure boom.
Valar counts Palmer Luckey, the Anduril founder, and Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer, among its backers. Others chasing the opportunity include Kairos Power and TerraPower (backed by Bill Gates), which are building next-generation reactors aimed at tech and industrial customers, and NuScale Power, the only SMR developer with U.S. regulatory design approval. (Last year, it won approval for an upgraded, higher-output reactor design.)
Valar’s technology is based on a helium-cooled, high-temperature gas reactor. The company says it eventually plans to build hundreds of SMRs to power data centers. But while SMRs are theoretically cheaper to manufacture than traditional reactors, the technology is still nascent and it’s not at all clear how long it will take to be deployed at industrial scale.
In the background, Valar has taken an aggressive legal stance toward its regulator. Last year, it joined several states and rival startups in suing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, arguing the agency wrongly applies the same lengthy licensing process to small test reactors that it uses for full-size commercial plants. (The case hasn’t been unresolved, with both sides repeatedly pausing litigation, which suggests some kind of settlement is in the works.)
The company was founded by Isaiah Taylor, who dropped out of high school when he was 16. The now-27-year-old has said he launched two startups before Valar and proudly shared that his great-grandfather worked as a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Patreon stops asking AI bots not to scrape — and starts blocking them
Patreon, the membership platform for creators, is cracking down on AI scraping its content for training purposes. On Thursday, the company shared that it’s working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block access to AI bots designed to train their AI models on creators’ work without permission.
The strengthened measures were necessary because AI scraping has become more sophisticated since it first put measures in place to deter AI crawlers in 2023, the company says. In addition, Patreon’s paywall has long locked much of creators’ content out of reach of crawlers. But more recently, the company introduced new discovery tools like a redesigned Home Feed and its tweet-like Quips, which could expose more content to crawlers.
The changes come about as more online publishers and content creators are coming to grips with how AI is ingesting their work for the purpose of making their AI models smarter. To combat this, Cloudflare now offers tools that allow website publishers to restrict AI bots, including a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping, dubbed Pay Per Crawl. Earlier this month, it changed its policies so that “mixed-use” crawlers, meaning those that both index and train on a website’s content, are blocked by default on any pages that host ads.
Patreon says that it’s extending its existing work with Cloudflare to use the company’s AI Crawl Control technology to update its AI policies and enforcement tools. The difference here is that instead of simply asking AI crawlers not to scrape content using the robots.txt files — a standard way to provide bots with instructions on how they can use its site — Patreon is now actively blocking AI training bots.
“Consent shouldn’t depend on whether a scraper chooses to behave,” a Patreon blog post explains, referencing the stricter measures.
When testing the features, individual AI training crawlers’ weekly attempts to access Patreon went from “thousands of attempts to zero,” the post noted. That indicates that the AI scrapers were ignoring Patreon’s robots.txt file and scraping the site anyway, despite its requests.
However, the company said that it will allow bots that index pages and organize information that can be used to send users back to Patreon.
“As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies,” remarked Patreon’s product chief Drew Rowny in the announcement. “On most of the Internet, creators have to accept AI training on their work just to reach and grow an audience. Patreon has a different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience and control how their work is used.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars
Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.
The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
When reached by email, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred TechCrunch to the company’s status page and did not comment further, or answer questions about the bug. The company would not say, when asked, if any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused as a result of the issue.
The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page.
Updated with a response from Amazon.
Tech
Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars
Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.
The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
When reached by email, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred TechCrunch to the company’s status page and did not comment further, or answer questions about the bug. The company would not say, when asked, if any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused as a result of the issue.
The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page.
Updated with a response from Amazon.
ACC notebook: Bill Belichick says UNC 'way ahead' of '25 team
Phillies try to rebound against Mets with storms looming
