Are you even a big tech company if you don’t have a nuclear strategy?

Top News

• We’re going to split some atoms: After Microsoft announced plans to de-mothball a nuclear reactor with a regional power company and Google detailed plans to work with a small modular reactor (SMR) company called Kairos for future nuclear power, Amazon is also making big moves. Today, the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant is working with two different power companies to bring SMRs online in Washington and Virginia and is investing in SMR startup X-Energy to boot.

• The FTC goes after dark patterns: U.S. regulators take lots of stick from the folks they regulate, but the FTC’s latest decision to make it easier for consumers and businesses to cancel subscriptions might bolster its reputation in technology circles. Called “Click-to-Cancel,” the FTC’s new rules will force companies to allow customers to cancel the same way that they signed up for a service — no more calling in!

• LightMatter raises $400M: As data centers get bigger and larger compute clusters are used to train ever-better AI models, LightMatter wants to shake things up. Its technology helps customer processors talk to each other at the speed of light, limiting the need for networking equipment to get chips and racks to talk to one another. With $400 million more in the bank, LightMatter’s long march to photonic chips could be coming to a data center near you, at last.

How about some power storage?

During our live news recording today — you are following the show on YouTube, right? — we ran out of time before we could get to a rundown of power storage-focused startups.

You might have caught the news that some folks in Australia are seeing their rooftop solar get turned off from the grid during times when demand is low and solar generation is high. Other countries are seeing power prices go negative at times as solar and other renewable energy sources shine. Literally.

So what to do? One solution is to scale up power storage so that when the sun is shining, the waves are pounding, and the wind is blowing, we can capture all that energy for later use. It turns out there are a host of startups working on that point.

I have yet to narrow down my lists, but here’s a smattering of companies that you should know about:

• Altris and Bedrock Materials are working on sodium-ion batteries

• Unbound Potential wants to build membrane-less flow batteries, while Flow Aluminum wants to build aluminum-CO₂ gas batteries

• Hydrostor wants to use compressed air to store huge amounts of energy, while Thaleron is working on a somewhat mysterious “mechanical” energy storage technology, and Sizable wants to build offshore pumped hydro energy storage

And that’s not all. KiteKraft wants to build floating turbines, and several startups like Byterat and Ionworks are building tools for folks designing and building new batteries.

If you ever feel down, just search a list of startups working on a problem you care about. It helps. — Alex

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This Week in Startups

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