Sam Altman steps down as Oklo board chair
Advanced nuclear company Oklo Inc. has new leadership for its board of directors as billionaire Sam Altman is stepping down from the position he has held since 2015. The move is meant to open new partnership opportunities with OpenAI, where Altman is CEO, and other artificial intelligence companies.

Altman in 2019. (Photo: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Jacob DeWitte, Oklo’s chief executive and cofounder, will serve as chair and board member, the company announced Tuesday. Altman’s departure from Oklo, which landed on his 40th birthday, is expected to open doors for strategic nuclear partnerships to support the deployment of “ energy at scale, particularly to enable the deployment of AI.”
“Historically, energy availability and cost, along with computational limitations, have been fundamental constraints on technological progress. A future where these are no longer limiting factors will be radically different, and I look forward to following Oklo’s leadership in driving this transformation,” Altman said.
Oklo was founded in 2013 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates DeWitte and Caroline Cochran. The company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (OKLO) in May 2024 through a merger with Altman’s AltC special-purpose acquisition company—leaving the nuclear start-up with more than $300 million in proceeds to fund company growth.
Quotable: “We deeply appreciate Sam’s leadership and dedication to our mission. We are excited to continue working to bring scalable, clean energy to the AI sector and beyond and to continue to explore strategic partnerships with leading AI companies, including potentially with OpenAI,” said Cochran, Oklo’s chief operating officer.
“Sam has been instrumental in shaping Oklo’s trajectory since the inception,” DeWitte added.
Advancing nuclear: Oklo develops next-generation nuclear reactors, with its primary focus being its Aurora Powerhouse microreactor, which produces 15 MW of electrical power and is scalable to 50 MWe. Each unit can operate for 10 years or longer before refueling, and Oklo is aiming to deploy the microreactors on a global scale. However, the design still needs approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Concept art of the Aurora Powerhouse microreactor. (Image: Oklo)
On March 24, Oklo announced its engagement in a preapplication readiness assessment with the NRC for its combined license application to site an Aurora Powerhouse reactor at Idaho National Laboratory—where it was the first to receive a site use permit from the U.S. Department of Energy for commercial advanced reactor testing. The company has been working with the NRC since 2016 to establish a pathway for its technology.
Latest news: To close out 2024, Oklo announced a partnership with data center developer Switch to deploy 12 GW under an agreement that runs through 2044 and is one of the largest corporate clean power agreements, according to the companies.
Oklo expects to start delivering electricity by 2030, Bloomberg reported in a December 18 article on the Switch deal.
Also noteworthy is Oklo’s announcement in March of two new board members—Daniel Poneman and Michael Thompson—as Chris Wright left the board following his appointment as energy secretary.
A closer look: Here are a few highlights from Altman’s career thus far in tech, as reported by Time magazine partner AllBusiness.com and British news outlet Observer—which described his path from a “teenage hacker to one of the most closely watched figures in tech.”
- Altman was born April 22, 1985, in Chicago and grew up in the Midwest, where he showed an affinity toward coding from a young age.
- He went to Stanford but dropped out his sophomore year in 2005.
- Altman launched Loopt, a location-based social media app, that same year and it attracted attention (and funding) from the then struggling start-up incubator Y Combinator.
- He joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner in 2011, took on the role of president in 2014, and during his tenure helped back companies including Airbnb, DropBox, Reddit, DoorDash, Instacart, and Coinbase.
- In 2015, Altman cofounded OpenAI with Elon Musk through $1 billion in pledged funding from Musk, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, and his own pocket.
- The partnership with Musk ended in 2018, which prompted OpenAI to launch a for-profit subsidiary to fund its research.
- OpenAI attracted interest from Microsoft, which invested more than $10 million as it began to incorporate AI models into its Azure cloud computing platform and other products, especially focused on a generative pro-trained transformer (better known as GPT).
- As of 2023, Altman’s AI company had released GPT-4 and GPT-4o to advance the technology.
- OpenAI is now valued at $157 billion.