AI's power problem just leased a 204,000-square-foot warehouse

AI's power problem has found a warehouse tenant. Aalo Atomics will renovate a 204,000-square-foot Georgetown warehouse into a machine shop and production floor for the small nuclear plants it builds on a factory line, with the AI data center as the customer it has in mind. Community Impact reported the $25 million project, groundbreaking expected in November and completion in early 2028, and Connect CRE carried the story.

Aalo's prospective buyers are the energy-intensive facilities that run AI, and the data center trade has already moved past buildings to power: the date a campus's substation goes live is the constraint that prices the asset. Aalo approaches the same bottleneck from the supply side, selling generation instead of campuses. Founded in 2023, the company has one demonstrated result — a Critical Test Reactor that reached a self-sustaining nuclear reaction and was built in under eight months.

Strip out the reactor and the deal is an ordinary industrial conversion: $25 million across 204,000 square feet works out to roughly $123 a square foot for a fit-out that includes production floor and machine shop, the kind of spend that suggests a tenant buying a shell rather than building one and whose real capital demands sit outside real estate. Landlords bidding 200,000-square-foot boxes against logistics users now have a second tenant category forming on the power side of this trade.

More telling than the price is the schedule: a company that brought a test reactor to criticality in under eight months will take longer than that just to fit out a building that already exists, with groundbreaking in November and completion in early 2028. The asymmetry says the binding constraint on Aalo's growth is not concrete and steel, the inverse of the rest of the AI infrastructure trade where the shell and the substation are exactly the bottleneck. It says, too, that data center load arriving before 2028 gets served by something other than a pod.

The Georgetown plant is selling optionality: a production platform a partner would price on output rather than on the building it sits in, and output is the one thing a $25 million renovation budget does not yet demonstrate. For industrial owners, the read is narrower: the energization buildout is now a tenant category that wants the same 200,000-square-foot boxes the market spent a decade calling commodity, and the first date that will show whether this one is real is the November groundbreaking.