Kyle Wool, chief executive officer of Dominari Securities, spoke with Quartz for the latest installment of our “Smart Investing” video series.
Watch the interview above and check out the transcript below. The transcript of this conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
ANDY MILLS (AM): So Nvidia’s had quite a run, but it faltered a little bit. It’s your view that investors need to start looking beyond the AI boom. Where do you see money being made?
KYLE WOOL (KW): Nvidia’s made a great move. Super Micro’s made a great move. These stocks have gone up five, six times from where they were a year ago, and that’s wonderful. But I think the ancillary businesses around them are the places that you can really make some money. You should start to look at, I think, how do you power these massive data centers? You are gonna power them through wind. Sure. Wind’s great when the wind blows, you’re gonna power ‘em through solar. Solar’s wonderful when the sun’s out. But the most efficient and greenest way to actually power these massive data centers is through nuclear. And you’re starting to see stocks like Constellation Energy, Talen energy, these stocks are up over a hundred percent in the last few months. And I think that’s because people are starting to realize this and I think they actually have more to go.
AM: Yeah. And people like Sam Altman and Bill Gates are also investing in nuclear energy. Are those companies going to be tradable? Can people buy those stocks?
KW: They can’t buy ‘em in the public markets right now, but they can buy ‘em in the private markets if they’re an accredited investor. What they’re doing is actually brilliant. What they’re doing is making small nuclear reactors that are going on point of a property, right? It’s gonna be right at the data center. And these will be able to power that data center directly without having to use the time and the waste of our United States grid and infrastructure. I think that’s gonna be a massive business. Sam Altman himself put $375 million into one of these recently, and Bill Gates has put more than that into that sector.
Read more: The AI craze is no dot-com bubble. Here’s why
AM: Nuclear energy has been around for a long time. It’s efficient, it’s cheap, but there’s a lot of fear around what could happen if things go wrong, what’s happening in AI making people sort of forget those dangers and just being like, ‘Let’s invest in nuclear!’
KW: No new nuclear reactors have really been built in the last 30 or 40 years, right? It’s this technology back when televisions were cabinets and now you’re getting people like Sam Altman that are forward thinking and Bill Gates, who’s also a pretty forward thinking guy, realizing if you’re going to have this much power, how are you gonna do it? It can’t happen through normal renewables. Are you gonna build more coal plants? Are you gonna build more fossil fuel plants? No. Nuclear is probably the best chance we have to power these. And I don’t think it’s gonna slow down anytime soon. So I do think people are saying maybe we’re not gonna have another, another Three Mile Island or another Fukushima. But I think if we’re having these right small plants, right, a point of contact, I think there’s a lot of opportunity.
AM: Yeah. So you mentioned Constellation is up a hundred percent over the past year. Do you still think there’s money to be made in brands like that?
KW: I do. I think when you look, there’s two aspects to nuclear. You have regulated nuclear, which is like your Duke Energy. They can’t jack the prices up. They’re controlled, right? They’re a utility. But then you have people like Constellation, which actually spun out of a utility and they can, they can have their prices go with demand and that’s why they’ve done so well. But I think for a more sophisticated investor, an accredited investor, he might wanna invest alongside someone like Gates or Sam Altman in some of these private companies because those could have that 10 to 20 times return if they can gain access.