By Kennedy Maize
The most mature U.S. small modular nuclear reactor vendor — NuScale Power — and a politically connected firm planning to build perhaps the largest reactor project in the U.S. to power an enormous Texas data center — Fermi America — have both suffered recent, major, possibly existential blows.
NuScale and Fermi, both publicly traded, have seen their stock value plummet amid bad financial results, questionable management decisions, and attacks by the wolves of Wall Street, short sellers, and claims of securities fraud. 
Oregon-based NuScale (NYSE:SMR) is the only advanced reactor vendor in this new market with a design approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a “first mover” advantage. It also uses the familiar and well-understood pressurized light water cooled technology, which has decades of mostly successful operation. NuScale has also had an important major shareholder, Texas-based energy engineering and construction giant Fluor Corp.
“Yet, when you look at its stock over the last six months, it doesn’t look like a company with a first-mover advantage,” comments The Motley Fool, an online investment analytics site.
Fluor is unloading its SMR shares, a strategy the company announced formally in February but has been understood to be well underway before that. In February, Fluor sold 71 million SMR shares, netting $2 billion. The company said it plans to unload the remaining 40 million shares this quarter.
Assessing NuScale’s business prospects, Seeking Alpha noted that the “stock appears overvalued relative to its fundamentals, with limited near-term revenue and a long timeline to meaningful commercialization.” The shares have been trading at about $12/share recently, not much higher than when it went public at the end of 2020. The high point for SMR was last July, when the shares were going for $50.
NuScale’s arrangement with the somewhat mysterious ENTRA1, the company’s “global strategic partner,” is also raising doubts about NuScale’s future. The contract with ENTRA1, says Seeking Alpha, required “a payment of ~$507.4 million” to the firm, a staggering amount considering that NuScale has never made anything like a profit.
Simply Wall Street commented, “In recent months, “NuScale Power has faced a series of securities-fraud class action filings alleging it misrepresented the experience and capabilities of commercialization partner ENTRA1 Energy, following weak fourth-quarter 2025 financial results and concerns about its path to market.”
One of the firms suing NuScale, California attorney Frank Cruz, in soliciting clients noted SMR’s astonishing net loss in the 2025 third quarter due to the ENTRA1 payment, “up from $46 million in the prior year period.” Cruz commented, “ENTRA1 had never built, financed, or operated any significant projects — let alone projects in the highly technical and complicated field of nuclear power generation — during its entire operating history” and “NuScale had entrusted its commercialization, distribution, and deployment of its NuScale Power Modules, and hundreds of millions of dollars of NuScale capital to an entity that lacked any significant prior experience owning, financing, or operating nuclear energy generation facilities.”
NuScale’s stock price has always been volatile, attracting short selling. That’s been the case recently. According to stock analysis Quiver Quantitative, “NuScale Power Corporation short interest was 38.92% of the float on April 15th, according to new data we received from Benzinga. Short interest totaled 66,321,822 shares, which was an increase of 23.88% from March 31st.”
Then there is Fermi America (NASDAQ: FRMI) with an incredibly optimistic business plan: the $60 billion “Project Matador,” using conventional electric generation, including natural gas and Westinghouse AP-1000 nuclear reactors, behind the meter, for a 17-GW mega data center in the Texas panhandle near the Department of Energy’s Pantex nuclear weapons plant. It would be named the “Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus.”
Among the founders of the company: Rick Perry, former Republican governor of Texas and U.S. energy secretary under Trump from March 2017 to December 2019. His role in the new company is largely image and political influence. The chief founder of the company was billionaire venture capitalist Toby Neugebauer, who has a sketchy business history according to Houston Chronicle columnist Chris Tomlinson.
Fermi LLC launched an initial public offering on the NASDAQ exchange last September as Fermi America, offering 25 million shares at an expected $18-$22 per share. The sale was successful, making Perry a paper billionaire. In March at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s annual Regulatory Information Conference, the company said it would break ground on Project Matador this year.
But the company had serious problems behind the initial hype, which became obvious this year: no revenue, no commercial tenant for its non-existent data center, losses totaling close to $500 million, a plunging share price. In December, the national plaintiffs’ law firm Berger Montague PC of Philadelphia filed a class action lawsuit against Fermi after an unnamed firm — widely believed to be Amazon — dropped out of a deal to be the first data center tenant, reportedly worth $150 million.
Fermi’s stock began plunging soon after the bad news began emerging. This month, without a public announcement, CEO Neugebauer “resigned,” taking with him Chief Financial Officer Miles Everson. The share price hit $5.
Commenting to the Washington Post on the fall of the house of Fermi, Princeton University energy guru Jesse Jenkins said, “The idea that a few politically connected people with little experience could pull off a many billion dollar, many gigawatt, fully off the power grid project is quite a gamble.”