Oklo Funds Ohio State’s First Nuclear Engineering Major as Data-Center Reactor Push Meets Talent Shortage

The company building a 1.2-gigawatt advanced nuclear campus in southern Ohio is now paying to train the engineers it will need to run it. At a campus event on 9 October 2026, Oklo and its executives announced the Oklo Ohio State nuclear engineering gift: $3 million to Ohio State, supplemented by $1.5 million in university matching funds, to create the university’s first undergraduate nuclear engineering major and renovate the facilities where those students will learn.

Ohio State currently offers only a minor and a graduate programme in nuclear engineering. University leaders have wanted a full undergraduate major for years, and the Oklo gift gives them the means: curriculum development, new faculty hires and modernised space, with the major targeted to open to students in autumn 2027, once the Ohio State Board of Trustees approves it. Oklo chief of staff John Hanson, an Ohio State alumnus, said the partnership was natural given the company’s southern Ohio project and his own ties to the university.

What the Oklo Ohio State nuclear engineering gift buys

The headline item is the undergraduate major itself, but the package reaches across the engineering college. Ohio State’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, a teaching and research facility on west campus since 1961, will be renamed the Oklo Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, with expanded research capabilities. A new Oklo Experiential Engineering Education Lab will open inside Scott Laboratory, giving capstone teams space for hands-on build work, simulation and modelling, and interdisciplinary engineering projects.

Half a million dollars of the $3 million comes directly from Hanson and his wife, together with Oklo CEO Jacob DeWitte and his wife, to endow two scholarship funds: the Dr. John Hanson and Dr. Lindsey Pack Endowed Scholarship Fund, and the Dr. Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Ann DeWitte Endowed Scholarship Fund in Nuclear Engineering. A separate Oklo Endowed Professorship in Nuclear Engineering is meant to help Ohio State recruit and retain leading scholars in the field.

“Industry demand for nuclear engineers continues to grow, and Ohio State is expanding to meet that need,” said College of Engineering interim dean B. Shanker. “Oklo’s support will help us launch a new undergraduate major and give students access to the faculty, facilities and hands-on experience that prepare them to contribute from the start of their careers.”

Workforce strategy, not philanthropy: the hiring-pipeline math

This gift is best read as workforce strategy, not philanthropy. The binding constraint on the US nuclear buildout is no longer just licensing or financing. It is people. A reactor company planning to build, staff and operate a 16-reactor campus in Piketon cannot hire its way out of a thin talent pool; the engineers it needs in the 2030s are undergraduates today. By funding a degree programme at the flagship university of its host state, Oklo is effectively buying the front end of its own hiring pipeline a decade before its reactors reach full capacity.

That marks a genuine shift in how advanced nuclear developers think about growth. Announcements about reactor designs and data-centre power deals grab headlines, but quietly building a talent supply chain, curriculum, faculty, labs, scholarships, is the slower work that determines whether those announcements become operating plants. Hanson’s framing was explicit: the company’s thesis is that nuclear should be the cheapest source of energy, and reaching that goal “needs an educated, growing workforce.” The more Ohioans learning about nuclear energy, he added, the better for Oklo: an unusually candid admission that the gift serves the company’s interests as well as the university’s.

There is also a geography argument. Robert Siston, chair of Ohio State’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, told reporters that few undergraduate nuclear engineering majors exist nationally, and that mapping them shows Ohio State “geographically filling a need.” The Midwest is where the new reactor build is concentrating: data-centre demand, existing nuclear supply chains, supportive state policy. The region’s universities are only now catching up with degree programmes to match.

A flagship without a major: the workforce gap in numbers

The contrast is stark. Oklo’s Piketon project aims for 1.2 gigawatts across 16 advanced reactors by 2034, built to power Meta’s data centres in New Albany, yet Ohio State, the flagship public university of the very state hosting that build, has never had an undergraduate nuclear engineering major. A multi-reactor construction wave is being planned in a state whose largest university could not, until now, train nuclear engineers from scratch.

The timing of the announcement, at the Oct. 9 campus event covered by The Columbus Dispatch, ties the academic investment directly to the industrial one. And Oklo is not alone in betting on campus pipelines: the data-centre industry’s appetite for firm nuclear power, including the Google–Constellation nuclear deal for AI data centres, means every major reactor project now competes for the same small pool of specialised graduates. Expect more developers to follow Oklo’s playbook, from fuel-cycle partnerships like the Thorizon–Urenco molten-salt fuel deal to university chairs and scholarships.

“The nuclear renaissance is growing. It’s very cool to be a part of that and kind of help push Ohio State forward into that moment. I think the real key with that nuclear renaissance and the growth there is that the people who are going to really impact that are in classrooms like this.” — John Hanson, Oklo chief of staff, at the Oct. 9 campus event

The major is not official yet: the Board of Trustees still has to approve it. But Siston said he is optimistic, with an autumn 2027 target. If it lands, the first cohort will graduate just as Piketon’s reactors begin the long climb toward 2034 full capacity. That timing is not accidental; it is the plan.