2 IPOs to Watch in 2026: Nuclear Fuel & Data
Centers
Meta description: Standard Nuclear and Csquare are heading to the US stock market in 2026. Here's what every American investor should know before buying in.
By a US markets writer covering IPOs and personal finance for over 8 years. Last updated: July 16, 2026.
Most people scroll right past IPO news. I get it — it sounds like something only Wall Street insiders bother tracking. But some of the biggest wealth-building opportunities in US stock market history started with an IPO that regular folks either jumped on early or completely ignored. Amazon. Google. Even Tesla, before it became a household name.
Right now, two very different companies are lining up to go public, and honestly, they couldn't be more different from each other on the surface — yet they're both riding the same wave. One makes advanced nuclear fuel. The other builds the data centers that power the internet, AI, and basically everything we do online. If you've been paying attention to US stock market news lately, you already know that energy and data infrastructure are two of the hottest themes heading into the back half of this decade.
So today, we're digging into Standard Nuclear (expected ticker: STDN) and Csquare (expected ticker: CSQR) — what they do, why they're going public now, what the numbers actually say, and whether either one deserves a spot on your watchlist. No hype, no guarantees, just a straightforward look at two companies about to test the public markets.
Grab a coffee. This one's a bit of a deep dive.
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Why IPOs Deserve a Spot on Your Radar
Before we get into the specifics, let's talk about why IPOs matter in the first place — especially if you're someone who's been Googling things like "best stocks to buy now USA" or "how to invest in US stocks" trying to figure out where to put your money next.
When a company goes public, it's opening its doors — literally handing over its financial statements, its risks, its growth plans — to anyone willing to read the prospectus. That's a rare moment. Most of the time, private companies operate in the shadows until they're already worth billions and the easy gains have been made by venture capital firms. An IPO is your chance to get in on the ground floor of the public market chapter of a company's story.
Is that always a good thing? Not necessarily. IPOs are famously volatile. Some pop 50% on day one and crash back down within weeks. Others quietly grind higher for years. The trick isn't chasing every IPO that hits the Nasdaq or NYSE — it's understanding the business well enough to know if the price actually makes sense.
That's exactly what we're going to do with these two.
Standard Nuclear: Betting on America's Nuclear Comeback
If you've followed any US stock market news about energy this year, you've probably noticed nuclear power is having a moment. Between rising electricity demand from AI data centers, national security concerns about foreign uranium supply chains, and a genuine bipartisan push to rebuild America's nuclear industry, the sector has gone from forgotten to fashionable pretty fast.
Standard Nuclear sits right in the middle of that story. This isn't a company that builds reactors — it makes the fuel that goes inside them. Specifically, they manufacture something called TRISO fuel, which is the gold-standard fuel type for what the industry calls "Advanced Reactors" — the next generation of smaller, safer nuclear reactor designs that companies and governments are racing to deploy.
What Makes Standard Nuclear Different
Here's the part that caught my attention: the company describes itself as the only participant in the market currently positioned to work with and develop fuel for any developer of Advanced Reactors that use TRISO fuel. In plain English — if you're building a next-gen nuclear reactor in the US and you need TRISO fuel, there's a real chance you'll eventually need to talk to Standard Nuclear.
They're led by Dr. Kurt Terrani, a nuclear fuel expert whose team reportedly carries over a century and a half of combined experience from US National Laboratories — the kind of pedigree that matters a lot in a highly regulated, safety-critical industry like nuclear fuel manufacturing. Several team members previously worked on the Department of Energy's advanced gas reactor program, which is essentially where the modern TRISO fuel standard was born.
The company isn't just talking big, either — they say they're already producing and shipping fuel for Advanced Reactor demonstrations scheduled for this year, with more production capacity expected to come online later in 2026.
There's also a side of this business a lot of people miss. Standard Nuclear isn't only chasing the commercial power market — it also produces radioisotope power systems for space and defense applications. That's a notable detail, because it means the company isn't purely dependent on terrestrial power plants getting built on schedule. Backed by US defense technology and critical infrastructure investment firms, part of the pitch here is reducing America's reliance on foreign, and specifically geopolitically adversarial, sources for these strategically sensitive technologies. In an environment where "supply chain security" has become a genuine national priority, that dual-use angle — power generation plus national security — is part of what's drawing investor attention.
On the corporate side, Standard Nuclear is a fairly young entity as far as public companies go. It was incorporated in Delaware in July 2024 and only actually began operations in January 2025, running out of its home base in Oak Ridge, Tennessee — fittingly, one of the historic hubs of America's nuclear research industry.
The Business Model — and the Catch
Standard Nuclear doesn't buy or sell uranium itself. Instead, customers bring their own enriched uranium feedstock, and Standard Nuclear converts it into finished fuel, typically getting paid on a per-kilogram basis. Think of it less like an oil company and more like a specialized manufacturing shop for one of the most tightly regulated materials on Earth.
Now here's where we need to talk risk, because this is important. As of March 31, 2026, the company's accumulated deficit stood at $79.9 million, with $4.3 million in negative operating cash flow for that quarter alone. Zoom out further and the losses have been climbing steadily — the accumulated deficit was $72.1 million at the end of 2025 and $56.6 million at the end of 2024, with negative operating cash flow of $6.7 million for full-year 2025 versus just $0.4 million in the shorter 2024 period, back when the company was barely getting off the ground. And by its own admission, TRISO fuel production has never really been proven at industrial scale before, which means nobody — including the company itself — has a clear picture yet of what profit margins will actually look like once real commercial-scale selling begins.
That's the classic early-stage growth story: massive potential market, unproven economics. If nuclear power really does see the renaissance that so many energy analysts are predicting, Standard Nuclear could be sitting on a genuine first-mover advantage. But if commercialization takes longer than expected, or if a competitor catches up, those losses could keep piling up for a while.
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Csquare: The Quiet Infrastructure Behind Everything Digital
Now let's shift gears completely and talk about Csquare, because this is a totally different kind of business — but arguably just as tied to where the US economy is heading.
You know how every conversation about the stock market lately eventually circles back to AI? Well, AI needs somewhere to actually run. That's where companies like Csquare come in. They own and operate data centers — the physical buildings packed with servers, cooling systems, and fiber connections that keep everything from your Netflix stream to enterprise cloud software up and running.
Scale That's Hard to Ignore
Csquare isn't a startup trying to prove a concept. As of early 2026, the company operates 64 data center sites across 21 major metro markets in the US, Canada, and the UK, delivering roughly 389 megawatts of what they call "Sellable Power Capacity" — basically, the amount of electricity they can lease out to customers who need to power their servers. They also support more than 36,600 interconnection products, which is the plumbing that lets different networks and cloud providers plug directly into each other inside their facilities.
Here's a stat that really puts their footprint in perspective: roughly nine out of every ten Americans live close enough to one of Csquare's facilities that their data can reach it in about two milliseconds. For businesses that need lightning-fast response times — financial trading firms, cloud gaming, AI inference — that kind of proximity isn't just nice to have, it's often a dealbreaker if it's missing.
Sticky Customers, Real Revenue
Unlike Standard Nuclear, Csquare isn't a pre-revenue story — it's already a serious, cash-generating business. The company pulled in $987 million in revenue for 2025, up from $907.6 million the year before, and its Adjusted EBITDA came in around $390 million. Contracts with customers typically run one to seven years, with an average remaining term of nearly three years, and — this is the number that jumps out at me — their net revenue churn is under 2% per quarter. That's an incredibly sticky customer base. Once a company's servers are physically installed in a data center, ripping them out and moving elsewhere is expensive and disruptive, so customers tend to stick around for years.
That said, don't mistake "profitable-sounding" metrics like EBITDA for actual net income. Csquare posted a net loss of $119.9 million for 2025, and another $66 million loss just in the first quarter of 2026, up from a $34.9 million loss in the same quarter of 2025. Data center operators tend to carry heavy depreciation and financing costs because building and expanding these facilities is capital intensive, even though their expansion costs — reportedly $4 million to $8 million per megawatt — are said to be meaningfully cheaper than building brand-new "greenfield" data centers from scratch.
Here's a wrinkle worth flagging, though: 2024 was actually a net income year for Csquare, with $458.5 million in the black — a huge swing compared to the losses posted in both 2023 and 2025. That kind of jump usually signals a one-time event (a gain tied to an acquisition or asset revaluation, for example) rather than a sign of a suddenly, permanently profitable business, which is exactly why it's worth looking past headline net income and paying closer attention to funds from operations (FFO), a metric real estate and infrastructure investors lean on heavily. Csquare's FFO came in at $152.0 million for 2025 and $718.1 million for 2024, versus a negative $29.3 million back in 2023 — again, that 2024 spike stands out and is worth digging into before assuming it's the new normal. For Q1 2026, FFO was $18.5 million, actually down from $28.8 million in Q1 2025, a reminder that even steady infrastructure businesses can have uneven quarters.
It's also worth noting Csquare didn't grow purely organically — the company expanded through acquisitions in January 2024 and October 2025, which helps explain some of the lumpiness in both its revenue growth (358% year-over-year in 2023 to 2024) and its net income swings. The business itself started life as a Delaware LLC back in 2018 before converting to a corporation in June 2026 ahead of this planned IPO.
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Standard Nuclear vs. Csquare: Two Different Bets on the Same
Trend
What's interesting is what happens when you put these two side by side. Both companies are essentially selling "picks and shovels" for the AI and energy boom rather than being the flashy, consumer-facing names everyone talks about.
- Standard Nuclear is an early-stage, high-risk, high-reward bet on the idea that America's nuclear industry is about to scale up in a serious way, and that advanced reactors will need a reliable domestic fuel source.
- Csquare is a mature, revenue-generating infrastructure company benefiting from the here-and-now boom in cloud computing and AI inference demand, with predictable, contract-based cash flows.
If you're the type of investor who gets excited about ground-floor, thematic growth stories — even with the risk that comes with them — Standard Nuclear might scratch that itch. If you're more drawn to steady, recurring-revenue businesses with real customers already locked in, Csquare fits that mold better, even with its current net losses.
Neither is a "sure thing." That phrase doesn't really exist in investing, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
How to Actually Evaluate an IPO Before You Buy
When I first started investing years ago, I made the classic beginner mistake — I bought into a hot IPO purely because everyone online was talking about it. I hadn't even skimmed the prospectus. It taught me a painful, expensive lesson about doing your own homework first.
So if you're considering either of these IPOs — or any IPO, really — here's a simple framework worth running through:
Understand what the company actually sells. Not the buzzwords, the actual product or service, and who pays for it.
Check the financials, not just the growth story. Revenue growth is exciting, but so is knowing how much cash a company is burning and how long its runway is before it might need to raise more money.
Look at customer concentration and contract length. A company with sticky, long-term contracts (like Csquare's average 33-month remaining terms) is generally more predictable than one relying on one-off sales.
Think about the lock-up period. After most IPOs, company insiders are restricted from selling shares for a set period, often 90 to 180 days. Prices can swing hard once that lock-up expires and insiders start selling.
Don't confuse a hot sector with a good price. Nuclear and data center infrastructure are both trending hard right now on Wall Street, but that doesn't automatically mean either stock will be fairly priced at IPO.
The Bigger Picture: Why Energy and Data Infrastructure Are
Dominating Wall Street Right Now
It's not a coincidence that both of these companies are going public around the same time. If you've been following Fed rate decisions, inflation reports, or general US stock market news, you've probably noticed a common thread — electricity demand in America is rising faster than it has in decades, largely thanks to AI data centers and the broader push toward digital infrastructure.
That demand surge is forcing utilities, tech companies, and even the federal government to look seriously at every possible power source, and nuclear has reemerged as a leading candidate because it delivers reliable, round-the-clock "baseload" power without the emissions of fossil fuels. At the same time, the physical buildings needed to house all this AI compute — the data centers themselves — have become just as critical as the power plants feeding them.
In other words, Standard Nuclear and Csquare represent two ends of the same supply chain: one produces the fuel for next-generation power, and the other provides the physical real estate where that power gets consumed by servers running everything from your favorite chatbot to your bank's mobile app.
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Risks Every Investor Should Weigh Before Buying Either Stock
Now, I'd be doing you a disservice if I only painted the rosy picture. Let's talk honestly about the risks, because balanced information is what actually helps you make good decisions — not cheerleading.
For Standard Nuclear, the biggest risk is simple: this is unproven, industrial-scale manufacturing of a highly specialized, safety-critical product. Regulatory approval processes in the nuclear industry move slowly, and if reactor developers delay their own timelines, Standard Nuclear's growth could stall right along with them. On top of that, the company is still deeply unprofitable, and there's no guarantee investors will be patient forever.
For Csquare, the risks look different. Data centers require enormous, ongoing capital investment, and the company is still posting net losses despite strong revenue and EBITDA. Rising interest rates could make financing new expansions more expensive, and if AI demand cools off faster than expected — something a lot of Wall Street analysts have debated openly this year — growth could slow.
And of course, there's the broader risk that applies to literally every IPO: newly public stocks tend to be more volatile than established, blue-chip names. If there's ever a broader stock market crash in the USA, or even just a rough patch for the Nasdaq or S&P 500, newly listed companies are often hit the hardest since they don't yet have years of trading history or investor trust built up.
How to Buy Shares When These IPOs Go Live
If either of these catches your interest, here's generally how it works for everyday American investors. Most major US brokers — think Fidelity, Charles Schwab, E*TRADE, or Robinhood — will let you place an order once the stock begins trading on the Nasdaq or NYSE. A smaller number of brokers occasionally offer access to shares before the public trading debut through special IPO access programs, though that access is often limited and not guaranteed for everyone.
For most retail investors, the realistic path is simply waiting for the stock to open for trading on its IPO day, and then deciding whether the opening price — which can move wildly in the first few hours — actually reflects fair value. There's nothing wrong with waiting a few days or even weeks after an IPO to see how the stock settles before buying in. Patience has saved plenty of investors from buying at an inflated first-day spike.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Standard Nuclear a good stock to buy at IPO?
That depends entirely on your risk tolerance. It's an early-stage, unprofitable company with a genuinely compelling growth story tied to America's nuclear rebuild, but it comes with real financial and execution risk. It's not a stock for someone looking for stability.
Is Csquare profitable?
Not on a net income basis — it posted a net loss in 2025 and Q1 2026 — but it generates strong Adjusted EBITDA and revenue growth, and its recurring, contract-based business model is far more mature than a typical IPO.
What ticker symbols will these companies trade under?
Standard Nuclear is expected to trade under STDN, and Csquare is expected to trade under CSQR, though ticker symbols can occasionally change before the actual listing date.
Where will these stocks be listed — Nasdaq or NYSE?
Both are expected IPOs tracked by Nasdaq's market activity listings, though the exact listing venue should be confirmed closer to the actual IPO date.
Should beginners invest in IPOs?
IPOs can be riskier than established stocks because there's less trading history to judge from. Beginners are often better served starting with diversified index funds tracking the S&P 500 or Nasdaq Composite, then adding individual, higher-risk positions like fresh IPOs only once they're comfortable with the ups and downs of individual stock investing.
How long should I hold an IPO stock before deciding if it's a good investment?
Most experienced investors suggest giving a newly public company at least two to four full quarterly earnings reports before drawing firm conclusions, since early trading is often driven more by sentiment and hype than by fundamentals.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, Standard Nuclear and Csquare represent two very different flavors of the same big American story — the race to power an increasingly digital, AI-driven economy. One is a scrappy, unprofitable pioneer betting on a nuclear renaissance. The other is a proven, revenue-generating infrastructure operator riding the data boom that's already well underway.
Neither is without risk, and neither deserves a spot in your portfolio just because it's trending in the news or showing up in every US stock market forecast article this month. Do the reading, understand what you're actually buying, and size your position according to how much uncertainty you're genuinely comfortable holding.
That's really the whole game in investing, isn't it? Not predicting the future perfectly, but making sure that when you're wrong, you can still sleep at night.
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About the Author
This piece was written by a US markets blogger who has covered stocks, IPOs, and personal finance for the past 8+ years, drawing on publicly available SEC prospectus filings and financial news coverage for the figures cited above.
Disclaimer:
This blog is for educational and informational purposes only. The views expressed here are general information and should not be considered financial or investment advice. Investing in the stock market involves risk, and you should consult a licensed financial advisor (SEC-registered where applicable) before making any investment decisions. The author and website are not responsible for any financial losses incurred.
nice blog
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