TL;DR
Florida startup Ampera established an Australian subsidiary to secure thorium supply for its advanced nuclear fuel programme. The company plans to vertically integrate from mine to TRISO kernel production, but has no operational reactor yet.
Ampera, a Florida-based nuclear energy startup, announced on Monday that it has established an Australian subsidiary to secure thorium supply for its advanced reactor programme. The company formed Ampera Australia Pty Ltd in February 2026 to procure and import thorium to the United States.
The move is part of a strategy to vertically integrate the nuclear fuel value chain. Ampera plans to source raw thorium from Australian deposits, process it, and manufacture TRISO fuel kernels at a facility in Florida, keeping every step in-house.
Why thorium
Thorium is roughly three to four times more abundant in the Earth’s crust than uranium. It produces less long-lived radioactive waste, cannot easily be weaponised, and is more thermally efficient in certain reactor designs.
Despite these advantages, thorium has never been used as a commercial nuclear fuel at scale. The existing global nuclear infrastructure is built around uranium, and no country has a commercial thorium fuel supply chain. Ampera is attempting to build one from scratch.
The reactor
Ampera describes its system as a factory-built, scalable, supercritical nuclear energy platform. The company holds more than 60 patents for nuclear fuel manufacturing, including proprietary jetting technology for producing TRISO fuel kernels.
TRISO (tri-structural isotropic) particles are small fuel spheres coated in layers of carbon and ceramic that can withstand extremely high temperatures without melting. They are the same fuel form used by X-Energy’s Xe-100 reactor, which raised $1 billion in a Nasdaq IPO earlier this year to power AI data centres.
The Australia connection
Australia holds some of the world’s largest thorium reserves, primarily as a byproduct of rare-earth mineral deposits. In October 2025, the US and Australia announced a framework for critical mineral supply cooperation, covering mining and processing of rare-earth elements.
Ampera’s CEO Brian Matthews said the company’s strategy is to “secure thorium directly at the source and vertically integrate the entire fuel value chain, from mineral supply through advanced fuel production.” The Australian subsidiary is the first step in that chain.
The context
The announcement arrives amid surging demand for nuclear power from the AI industry. Data centre operators have signed conditional offtake agreements for roughly 45 gigawatts of small modular reactor capacity, nearly double the pipeline from a year ago.
Most of that pipeline is built around uranium-fuelled designs. Thorium reactors remain earlier-stage, and Ampera has not disclosed a timeline for its first operational unit. The company is pre-revenue and pre-reactor, with its near-term milestone being TRISO kernel production rather than power generation.
If Ampera can produce thorium TRISO fuel at commercial scale, it would offer reactor developers an alternative to the uranium supply chain that is currently concentrated in Russia, Kazakhstan, and a handful of Western enrichment facilities. That is a meaningful proposition in a market where energy security and supply chain independence are becoming as important as cost per megawatt. But the gap between 60 patents and a working fuel supply chain is measured in years and billions of dollars, not announcements.
