Data Centers Go Nuclear, GitHub Ad Controversy, and AI Vibe Fraud?
Research Rundown #179, plus a new report on ByteDance
Data Centers Go Nuclear
This week, nuclear energy startup Valar Atomics raised $450 million at a $2 billion valuation. The company, which was founded in July 2023, raised a $130 million in Series A funding just six months ago. The new round was backed by Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, and Lockheed Martin board member John Donovan. Valar’s model centers on “gigasites”, clusters of small modular reactors operating together, sized to sit directly behind a hyperscaler’s fence line.
The bet on Valar reflects a larger tailwind: data center electricity consumption reached 176 terawatt-hours in 2023 and could exceed 580 terawatt-hours by 2028, accounting for up to 12% of national demand. Operators seeking grid access face interconnection wait times of around five years, and existing nuclear plants have had their output pre-sold. SMRs, such as those provided by Valar, address this directly: at 50 to 300 MW, some designs can be sized to match data center load and require only a few dozen acres.
However, the challenge will be to scale SMR energy production to meet surging demand. To date, no SMRs in the US are in commercial operation. This challenge is exacerbated by regulatory hurdles like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which Valar is suing for what it believes are unlawful restrictions on small-scale reactor innovation, as the NRC requires SMRs to follow the same approval process as large plants. Meanwhile, hyperscalers have signed agreements in recent months to power their data centers with traditional reactors; for example, reports this week indicate that Amazon wants to build data centers at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant.
Waiter, There’s an Ad in My Code
GitHub was in hot water this week after Australian developers using Copilot found ads in PR messages from the coding tool. The team was using Copilot to address a typo in a code PR when the tool inserted a promotional message for productivity app Raycast, complete with an install link, in the PR. The users initially thought that the message was the result of a novel prompt injection or similar hack, but found the same message in over 11.4K GitHub pull requests, all authored by Copilot without the original developers’ awareness.
In response to this incident, GitHub VP of developer relations Martin Woodward clarified that “there were no ad arrangements with any company,” and said a bug had caused the messages to pop up in the unrelated PRs. Tim Rogers, principal product manager for Copilot, explained that “We’ve been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent… hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgment call. We won’t do something like this again.”
By Monday afternoon, GitHub had reversed course entirely, disabling the tips across all pull requests created by or touched by Copilot, and said, “GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub…. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward.” Users of the tools, however, remain skeptical that the messages were not ads, supposing that “They probably redefine ‘ad’ in their terms of service so their own ads are called something else.”
Can Vibes Survive Contact With Reality?
People have been talking about one-person billion-dollar companies ever since ChatGPT launched. Back in 2024, Sam Altman said he had made a bet with other CEOs about when it would happen. This week, he declared that it had arrived. The first billion-dollar, one-person company? A vibe-coded startup called MEDVI.
So what does the company do? The headlines made it seem like a triumph of vibe coding; the company reportedly grew to $1.8 billion in revenue in just 14 months “using AI.” But the details call that into question. MEDVI sells GLP-1s. More specifically, it uses an infrastructure of thousands of doctors and engineers from CareValidate and OpenLoop to dropship GLP-1s. But digging into the details, you find the company has used fictitious doctors, received an FDA complaint about “false and misleading claims”, and potentially isn’t using a prescription approval process at all since some users are saying they want to get down to 60 pounds and are still being approved.
The power of AI can no doubt supercharge any business. But, from our perspective, the search for the first billion-dollar vibe-coded company continues.
Latest Research
In January, ByteDance came to an agreement with the US government, averting a TikTok ban. See our new report here.
What We’re Reading
OpenAI has acquired TBPN, the podcast and tech media company, to “help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates.” While joining OpenAI’s strategy organization, TBPN will maintain its editorial independence to continue providing objective commentary on the tech ecosystem.
Federal officials selected a 5K-acre site in Pike County to construct a $30 billion, 3-gigawatt facility that will become the nation’s largest data center as part of a newly finalized federal trade agreement.
Technology firm Nebius launched a €1.5 billion construction project for a dedicated AI factory in Finland, deploying 100K advanced GPUs to what will be one of Europe’s largest data centers.
Google researchers published a technical proof-of-concept demonstrating a computational method capable of successfully bypassing standard 2048-bit encryption protocols in under 24 hours, making historically secure blockchain-based protocols potentially vulnerable.
Anthropic is actively working to contain a critical cybersecurity breach after an unauthorized party leaked over 50K lines of proprietary source code powering its Claude AI agent, issuing copyright-takedowns to thousands of impacted GitHub repositories.
Apple mistakenly deployed the first public instances of its updated Apple Intelligence machine learning features to over 250 million compatible consumer devices across China before pulling the updates as the company awaits full regulatory approvals.
Troubled Y Combinator-backed startup Delve faces further battles after burning through its initial $40 million funding round and navigating a 75% employee turnover rate, as the company now faces allegations that it copied software from Sim.ai without a license agreement.
NERC’s Accelerated Large Load Action Plan, filed with FERC under docket RM26-4, issued a Level 3 Alert in May 2026 for data-center related risk mitigation, the highest level ever issued by the agency, encouraging operators to conduct thorough risk assessments and create mitigation plans for future data-center driven grid instability.
Orbital computing startup Aetherflux announced that it is targeting a $2 billion valuation to deploy 50-megawatt orbital nodes, while competitor Starcloud secured a $170 million Series A round to launch an initial constellation of 20 hardware data centers into space.
The US secured a $565 million financing package granting offtake rights to heavy rare earths produced by Brazil’s Serra Verde,** one of the few non-Chinese sources globally, as part of the Trump administration’s strategy of advancing critical minerals access through transactional resource diplomacy.
At Contrary Research, we’ve built the best starting place to understand private tech companies. If you're interested in researching and writing about tech, apply here for our Research Fellowship!