Centrus and Oklo Sign Definitive HALEU Supply Deal for Ohio Reactors

Centrus Energy and Oklo have turned a non-binding fuel pact into a signed, multi-year supply contract, the two companies said on November 12, giving Oklo’s planned fleet of small reactors in Ohio a firmer claim on one of the nuclear industry’s scarcest materials: high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU.

The definitive agreements replace a letter of intent the two companies signed in June, which itself built on an earlier memorandum of understanding from March. Under the new contracts, Centrus will supply enough HALEU to fuel up to five of Oklo’s Aurora powerhouses over several years, with deliveries scheduled to begin in 2029. The fuel is earmarked for Oklo’s planned 1.2-gigawatt reactor campus in Ohio, built to supply electricity to data centres operated by Meta.

From letter of intent to binding contract

The distinction matters. A letter of intent signals an expectation of doing business but does not obligate either party to deliver or pay for anything; a definitive supply agreement does. Centrus said the contracts commit Oklo to prepayments for future HALEU shipments — payments that Centrus can use to help fund the expansion of its enrichment capacity, though neither company disclosed the size of those prepayments.

Centrus operates the only facility in the United States licensed to produce HALEU, the American Centrifuge Plant in Pike County, Ohio. The company said it plans to install additional centrifuge cascades there to grow output, and it now counts $5.4 billion in total customer contracts and commitments for low-enriched uranium and HALEU tied to that expanded capacity.

The Meta connection

Meta is not a party to the Centrus-Oklo fuel contracts, but its money is part of what makes them possible. In January, Meta agreed to prepay Oklo for future electricity from reactors covering up to 6.6 gigawatts of capacity across several planned projects, part of the company’s push to secure dedicated power for artificial intelligence data centres. The Ohio campus is one of the sites that agreement is meant to support, and Oklo’s ability to prepay Centrus for fuel rests in part on the cash Meta has committed for future power.

“Securing fuel is essential to scaling our power business beyond our first reactor in Idaho,” Oklo co-founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte said in the companies’ announcement. Centrus President and CEO Amir Vexler said the deal shows “Centrus is ideally placed to meet and support the upcoming substantial commercial demand” for HALEU. Shares of both companies rose on the day of the announcement, with Oklo up roughly 4% and Centrus up more than 12%, according to market reports.

Why HALEU is the bottleneck

HALEU is enriched to a higher concentration of uranium-235 — between 5% and 20% — than the fuel used in today’s large commercial reactors, allowing compact designs like Oklo’s sodium-cooled Aurora to run longer on a smaller fuel load. Almost every US advanced-reactor developer has settled on some version of HALEU, but Centrus remains the only domestic producer with an NRC licence to make it commercially, which has made long-term fuel contracts like this one a precondition for financing and building new reactor fleets rather than a later-stage detail.

Oklo’s own first unit, planned for Idaho National Laboratory, is a separate case: it is designed to run on HALEU recovered from leftover fuel from the old EBR-II research reactor, not from Centrus’s enrichment plant. The Ohio HALEU contract is specifically about scaling Oklo’s business beyond that first, smaller-scale project.

Part of a broader fuel supply push

The Centrus-Oklo contracts arrive amid a wider scramble among US reactor developers and their customers to lock down nuclear fuel supply before new plants are built. Centrus shipped the first domestically manufactured centrifuge to its Ohio enrichment plant in late October, and Westinghouse said it would invest $1 billion in a new US nuclear fuel plant the same month. On the demand side, South Korea has pledged $120 billion toward new reactors in the United States, and tech companies have moved from power-purchase talk to binding commitments, as seen when Amazon signed a 20-year nuclear deal with Constellation to expand Calvert Cliffs.

Oklo itself has not had an unbroken run of good news this year: FERC rejected the company’s bid to rejoin PJM’s grid interconnection queue in Virginia in September. The Centrus deal addresses a different constraint — fuel supply rather than grid access — but both episodes point to the same underlying story: the regulatory and industrial infrastructure around advanced reactors is still being built out alongside the reactors themselves.

Sources

• Centrus Energy and Oklo, joint press release distributed via Business Wire, November 12, 2026 — deal terms, executive quotes, contract value. businesswire.com
• World Nuclear News, “Centrus, Oklo deal secures fuel for Ohio reactor deployment,” November 13, 2026 — independent coverage and context. world-nuclear-news.org
• Oklo Inc., newsroom, November 12, 2026 — company statement.
• Market reports on share price moves following the announcement, November 12, 2026.

Illustrative image. Photo: Nuclear Regulatory Commission from US, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — source