NuScale Power Corporation Class A

Good afternoon and welcome to New Scale's second quarter 2025 earnings results conference call. Today's call is being recorded. A replay of today's conference call will be available and accessible on New Scale's Investor Relations website. A web replay will be available for 30 days following the earnings call. At this time for opening remarks, I would like to turn the call over to Rodney McMahon, Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Welcome to New Scale's second quarter 2025 earnings results conference call. With us today are John Hopkins, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ramsey Hamaddy, Chief Financial Officer. On today's call, we will provide an update on our business and discuss our quarterly financial results. We will then open the phone lines for questions. This afternoon, we posted a set of supplemental slides on our Investor Relations website. As reflected in the Safe Harbor Statements on Slide 2, the information set forth in the presentation and discussed during the course of our remarks and the subsequent Q&A session includes forward-looking statements which reflect our current views of existing trends and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties. You can find a discussion of our risk factors which could potentially contribute to such differences in our 2024 Annual Report on Form 10K and subsequent SEC filings. I'll now turn the call over to John Hopkins, New Scale's President and Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Rodney, and good afternoon, everyone. To begin, I'd like to remind everyone who we are and why New Scale is a global leader in Small Modular Reactor, or SMR, technology as outlined on Slide 3. Founded in 2007, New Scale is years ahead of the competition as the only SMR technology approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC. For more than a decade, our team has worked alongside the NRC to achieve the successful approval of our designs, including a second approval for our 77-megawatt electric design in the second quarter of 2025, a crucial step in moving New Scale and our exclusive commercialization partner, InterOne, closer to meeting the demands of energy users in need of clean, baseload power. Our design approvals, combined with an established manufacturing ecosystem, a -to-date investment of approximately $2 billion to de-risk plant licensing and operation, and unmatched safety capabilities make New Scale the only near-term deployable SMR technology with 12 New Scale power modules currently in production. Through 18 years, New Scale has capitalized on the maturity and strong foundation of light-water reactor technology and has moved forward with confidence to develop unmatched capabilities with unprecedented continuity and consistency of vision. Our SMR technology offers a wide range of carbon-free, energy-intensive application possibilities, as outlined on Slide 4. Working with industry and national laboratories, New Scale has assessed the integration of these applications into facilities powered by New Scale power modules and published the results in peer-reviewed journals or presented them at national conference proceedings. These applications include providing power to mission-critical facilities, water desalinization needs, and hydrogen production and process heat to meet the needs of commercial-scale industrial applications. However, the application currently garnering the most attention and representing the biggest opportunity for New Scale's technology is a generation of uninterruptible, carbon-free base-load power to meet the energy demands of advanced data centers and sophisticated artificial intelligence systems. While there are other SMR technologies in development, New Scale's module architecture is the only one with NRC approval. It's the only one in the manufacturing stage and the only one that offers the flexibility to serve multiple energy applications within a single plant, as our design allows for different modules in the same power plant to be designated for a variety of applications. Turning to Slide 5, we summarize the New Scale and InterOne Global Commercialization Partnership. Under this partnership, New Scale, serving as a technology provider, sells its New Scale power modules directly to InterOne for installation in the reactor buildings of InterOne energy plants. InterOne, in turn, develops, finances, and depending on the business model, may own and operate the energy production plants powered by New Scale's SMR technology. By providing customized plant development, ownership, and operating structures, InterOne is able to de-risk projects and meet each customer's unique needs. We continue to be optimistic that the growing interest in our technology in its critical use cases, as well as New Scale's distinctive competitive edge in the module manufacturing and conventional fuel readiness, will result in an order in 2025 for our New Scale power modules. Since our last earnings call, we have seen strengthening of the regulatory tailwinds supporting the nuclear power industry, driven by the President's executive orders to deploy advanced nuclear reactor technologies in support of national security. These executive orders, which we summarize on Slide 6, were issued in addition to ongoing bipartisan support for the advancement of carbon-free advanced nuclear projects through the Inflation Reduction Act, a $900 million appropriation for SMR-specific cost-sharing funding. In the Advanced Act, designed to streamline NRC approvals for faster deployment, New Scale supports these efforts to transform and modernize the NRC while maintaining the NRC safety standards. While not all regulatory actions will directly benefit New Scale, as we have progressed beyond research and development to commercialization, we expect a benefit from shortened regulatory timelines for new deployments, a bolstered domestic nuclear supply chain, and the overall commitment of the U.S. government to prioritize the deployment of advanced nuclear reactor technologies. Importantly, interest in New Scale's SMR technology extends domestically and abroad. As discussed on Slide 7, New Scale continues to support Rho Power's goal of developing and deploying the first SMR power plant in Romania, Ator Chest. The site of a decommissioned coal-fired plant that is now entirely removed. To further advance the project, in June of this year, an International Atomic Energy Agency site and External Events Design Advisory Mission visited Ator Chest to advise on the finalization of the site license application. The project continues to generate revenue and positive cash flow for New Scale from engineering and licensing fees. As well as pre-commercial operation date services, primarily in connection with the Florida-led Phase II Front-End Engineering and Design Study. As this critical work on the Rho Power project continues, we are also working with Florida towards their input to a final investment decision. In a second quarter, we also continued our efforts to prepare the next generation of nuclear talent by opening two more energy exploration or E2 centers. At South Carolina State University and George Mason University, bringing a total number of New Scale E2 centers to 11 with locations in the US, Europe, Asia, and Africa. As discussed on Slide 8, these centers use -the-art computer modeling paired with a fully integrated SMR control room simulator, supporting users to step into the role of control room operators and navigate a wide range of simulated plant scenarios. These workstations provide real-time visibility into the status of any unit across the plant model, enabling effective oversight of operations. It is worth noting that, unlike traditional nuclear energy facilities, our New Scale power modules are designed with advanced safety systems that operate independently of human intervention, offering a new standard for passive safety. We are proud of the progress we continue to make at New Scale as a leader in our space and excited to continue to build on this momentum through the remainder of the year. Now over to Ramsey for the financial update.

Thank you, John, and hello everyone. Our financial results are available in our filings, so my focus will be on explaining major line items which can be found on Slide 9. New Scale's overall equity and capital resources, which includes cash and cash provance, short-term investment, and long-term investment, remained a robust $489.9 million in total at June 30, 2025. This represents a $31.5 million decline from the prior quarter, but an increase of $359 million from the same quarter in the prior year. New Scale reported revenue of $8.1 million for the quarter ended June 30, 2025, compared to $1 million during the same period in the prior year. This increase was primarily driven by fees received from the engineering and licensing work, as well as other pre-commercial operational-based services we provide in support of the ROE Power Project. Operating expenses were $44.9 million for the quarter ended June 30, 2025, compared to $42 million during the same period in the prior year. While operating expenses increased slightly in the second quarter, a quarterly spend remained consistent with prior periods and reflects management's disciplined approach to cash management. Looking ahead, we expect operating expenses to increase beginning the second half of 2025 as purchases of long-leaved materials increase to further enhance our manufacturing and supply chain readiness. I will conclude my remarks with a brief overview of our capitalization summary, as shown in slide 10. Additional information may be found in our 10 Q&E release, both of which are filed with the SEC. With that, I'd like to thank you again for joining today and for your continued support of New Scale. We'll now take questions. Operator?

Operator? Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question today, remember it's star followed by the number one on your TootsTone phone. Our first question for today comes from the line of Mark Bianchi with TD Cohen. Your line is live.

Hey, thanks, guys. Ramsey, I guess just to follow up on that, you talked about the operating expense increase in the second half. I'm curious if you could quantify that. Is this related to the earlier plan to increase the long-leaved item procurement, or are you actually increasing that again? I think it was 12 modules. Are you going up to more than that, or is this just part of the original plan and the phasing that's been?

Yeah, Mark. I appreciate you asking that because we did want to indicate to our analysts and to the markets that we do plan an increase in an op-ex for Q3, an additional increase for Q4. That's really, Mark, while I think you're aware we don't provide specific guidance on numbers, but that is in line with our efforts to continue to develop 12 modules and develop our supply chain and invest in the commercialization of New Scale. There's an intent to build more than 12 modules right now. We don't build speculatively, but we are investing in our supply chain in anticipation of commercial contracts and design validation, investing in supply chain just takes additional money. We've maintained this plan over, I think it's been six quarters where we've held op-ex to plus or minus 5% or so. And now we're engaging a very focused and very methodical increase in op-ex in order to engage the supply chain and just get ready for the commercial contracts which we're anticipating.

Okay, great, thanks. Another question on the floor when they had their quarter the other day, they also had an announcement about converting B shares to A shares and said they're looking at a stock market-facing solution rather than the strategic that they've been talking about for several quarters. And I guess I'm curious, I know you guys don't have anything to say probably about their plans for selling stock, but my question is more about the strategic transaction, some presumed partner of New Scales or would-be partner of New Scales that could have an equity stake now no longer potentially having that equity stake, does it change sort of the business outlook or the -to-market strategy that you guys would have if that strategic weren't to be an equity holder of

New Scales? Yeah, I think maybe a few comments there. One is a clarification item, Mark. So, FLIR owns Class B units, and so they're a Class B unit holder. Class B units may be exchangeable to Class A shares. And periodically we offer B unit holders an opportunity to engage in exchange. And at the last time we approached the Class B unit holders, FLIR held their hands up and said, hey, we'd like to do an exchange. And we permitted conversion of 50 million shares subject to some bumpers because we just weren't sure that we maintained early markets. Mark, I can't read into whether or not FLIR will even sell those Class A shares. I have no idea. I don't know if their strategy has changed -a-vis a strategic shareholder. But I'll tell you that our -to-market strategy has not changed. And, you know, FLIR's actions in relation to their shares are, those are their own decisions. And we don't have insight and we don't provide commentaries. But our -to-market strategy hasn't changed at all. It's well defined. It's been consistent. I think it's a winning strategy. And we maintain that regardless of what FLIR does with their ownership stake.

Okay. Thanks very much. I'll turn it back.

Okay. Thank you, Mark.

Our next question comes from the line of Sharif El-Maghrabi with BTIG. Your line is

live. Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you remind us how many modules Doosan can make in a year? And you talked about maintaining discipline. What would it take for you to order long lead items for another six modules this year?

Yeah, this is John Hopkins. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

No, no, John. You go ahead,

please. Doosan has commented to us that they can make up to 20 modules per year with the existing and also they continue to up. You know, interestingly, last month we actually took a customer with us and a state government official to visit Doosan to actually see production ongoing. And they're quite surprised at how advanced Doosan was in the manufacture of our modules, not only the modules, but the helical coil steam generators. So going out and actually seeing in production and touching steel, so to speak, that's a major marketing tool for us that I don't believe anybody else currently could do that within the market.

Thank you for your questions. Our next question is from the line of Eric Stein with Craig Hallam. Your line is live. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions.

Hey, how you doing?

Hey, doing well. So obviously in Q2, I mean, the upper rate approval, that was a very nice event to have that. And I guess you were saying that there are some challenges that occur early. You know, I'm curious, you know, has that set off, you know, maybe a higher number of discussions, maybe taking those discussions to an elevated level of engagement? I mean, obviously that was a needed step to reach your goal of a firm commitment by the end of 2025. So just curious the response or the impact of that.

Yeah, this is John Hopkins. I would say that the response people were in a waiting mode to see if in fact we could go from the 50 to 77. It was accomplished. We're there. And now we are in fact seeing more line of sight of traditional customers. In fact, last week we were with a new customer that I would say new. We've been in discussions with quite some time. And there was kind of a holding mode. But now that we're 77, it's prompted him to have additional conversations with us going forward.

And if I can add, let's call it what it is. It wasn't just like a nice thing to have. We're the only company with two NRC approvals for small modular reactors. There's no other company with even one. And we got through with two. And there's a lot of people out there doubting, saying, hey, you're not going to get through. It's going to take too long. And it's going to overrun this and that's the other. And we came out very quietly, just like we always do. We got the work done. We got across the line early. I mean, our team's working on that. They did an absolutely excellent job. They smashed it. It was a grand plan to get that done early, get over the line, and just further differentiate us from the competition.

Yeah, that's a good point, Ramsey. We were scheduled for a July completion. And we made it two months earlier. And I got to give credit to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and our licensing team for staying on top of it and getting it accomplished. Because to Ramsey's point, it has opened the aperture for other customers because we are near-term deployable. We got modules in production. We're ready to go. We have under Part 52, we have both an operating license and a construction license. You've seen a lot of construction permits, but you can build a plant, but you can't operate it without an operating license.

Yep, absolutely. No, I mean, a clear differentiator. Maybe a good segue. I mean, obviously, this took you, I mean, the up-rate, clearly a shorter period of time, given that you'd already had the first up-rate and that that was an add-on. But as you think about the regulatory process and the differentiator that that is in the market, maybe some high-level thoughts on the regulatory environment and a lot of the talk about whether it's streamlined process, potentially the DOD or the DOE having some say in the regulatory side of it. Just maybe what you think that means for some of your competitors or just others in the market, that would be very helpful.

Yeah, I think one, I think a big distinctive we have is we are using conventional fuel that's readily available in the marketplace. There's 400 plus light water reactors around the world. We don't need high-assay halo fuel, which is going to be an issue, I think, going forward. It's going to be costly. But as it relates to the NRC, you know, having been through the process, what we're hoping for is more of the streamlining of getting to the construction operation license agreement. And, you know, it's going into the build stage of our plants. Having, again, we're not having to worry about going to the NRC licensing, per se, but, you know, we are hopeful that it is to be seen. You know, are other technologies going to be able to move quicker? I hope so. We don't necessarily want to be a monopoly or the only US-based customer. And the market is, and you could just read the headlines every day, the market potential on a global scale is phenomenal.

OK, thank you. Eric, I would add to that the other major differentiator is our progress of our supply chain. There's no one else that's engaged manufacturing supply chain like we have. You know, even with a group like Doosan, we've been working for seven years. They've invested, you know, even not necessarily in an equity perspective, but in their facility, in new technologies and building our L.M. The supply chain differentiation is massive. And so, you know, there's a two-part dance here, regulatory licensing, but also you got to get the darn things built. And that takes a hard-leaning effort. And we've been engaged in that for years now.

Yeah, actually, I had dinner last, I'm sorry, I had dinner last week with the CEO of one of our suppliers out of Japan, IHI. And again, we sat down and looked through the pipeline of what the potential opportunities are and, you know, for them to gear up. But if you look at some of these organizations like Doosan as an example, they have many sub-contractors that here in the United States were engaged with, too. And many of the suppliers, we had a phenomenal over 100 people, I think it was 32 suppliers in North Carolina, kicking the tires and ready to get tooled up to take advantage of the opportunities they see coming down the pike.

Very good. Thank you for your questions. Our next question is from the line of Sundariya Iyer with Riley Securities, your line is live.

Hi, everyone. This is Sundariya on behalf of Ryan Fink from the Riley Securities. Thanks for taking my question. Yeah, I just wanted to touch on the macro part, like looking at the recent executive orders, like what do you guys think are the mandates or directions in the executive orders, which are like most beneficial for new skills specifically?

Ramsey?

I'm sorry, John. When we look at the executive orders, I think there's more of a macro idea that promotes the whole industry. I mean, there's a lot that supports new skill, there's a lot around licensing, but the licensing that we see in the executive orders that benefits us specifically is more site-specific licensing. And I think when you're dealing with projects and projects that are not necessarily for us, remember, Enter One does the project, they execute on projects, that type of licensing is more beneficial to us simply by the fact that we're so far ahead of the competition. So, you know, I think there's some tailwinds for licensing in relation to technology, and that's great, and that's good for the whole industry, and we support that. But in terms of the most recent executive orders, looking at how they would seek to expedite site-specific licensing benefits new skill more than anyone else. I think that just further pushes us ahead.

Yeah, and part of that answer, we spend a lot of time on the Hill with both sides of the aisle and the bipartisan support for advanced nuclear for a variety of reasons, either national security or reliability or climate disruption. I think it's stronger now than I've seen historically, and that bodes well for the industry. And it's just a matter of time that we're going to see a big movement, I believe, within this country. This current administration is pressed to get success stories quickly. They have a limited period of time to make that happen. So I think with the executive orders, with the possible streamlining of the NRC, and as I stated, that where it benefits us is to move quicker on the construction and the exploration side of the ledger. I think the tailwinds bode well for the industry and New Scale particularly.

But that's helpful. Thank you. And if I may add in just one more, on your expectation on sort of like what would be the first project or how it would look like in terms of potential partners or the power users?

Well, as we stated, we're working with our developer strategic partner, InterOne, and InterOne has been out in conversations with our government and with prospective clients to do, you know, it's the hyperscalers, it's utilities, it's even a process in companies, because what we're still seeing, many of these entities don't necessarily want to own the nuclear asset. They just want 24-7 clean energy. And so what we're seeing is, you know, if I look historically what the market has been, coal plant refurbishment, that's not gone away. We still see a pretty big spike of coal plant closures coming up. Process oriented heat. We are the only company that has a legitimate emergency planning zone licensed by the NRC at site boundary. That is bode well for process oriented companies that would like to see something outside the fence line where any disruption wouldn't have a material impact on their ongoing business operations. And then the big gorilla in the room is still the hyperscalers, data centers, and their thirst for energy going forward. And a plus that they see a new scale is the scalability of our units with 12 modules online. That's 924 megawatts. You're pushing a gigawatt size. But the beauty of that, any refueling cycle is only a 10 day cycle. So you could take one down and you have 11 modules continue to run 24-7. It's not like a single screw plan, as we state, that once that plant comes offline, you have to look elsewhere for energy. So that's a big selling point for us.

Thank you. If you want to

take a look at the business model, I think also our presentation, I think on the third slide has a good explanation of the business model with Petro One and how we intend to work together and then how they intend to work with power users and utilities. And so there's a good explanation there of how we're going to build and develop plants. And also, just since we're on the presentation, put the page from there. And the next slide talks about the regulatory tailwinds. It goes into specific executive orders. Most of them like the May 23rd, 2025 executive orders. And then the output of what we see from a macro basis. When I talk about site-specific ideas, it was a response to the question of, hey, what benefits do you scale specifically? I think site-specific ideas benefit us the most since we are licensed and we are near term deployable. But if you want a full rundown, there's a good summary there within our investor presentation.

Sure, I'll check that out. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying. Thank you.

Our next question is from the line of Vikram Bakri with Citigroup. Your line is live.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. This is Vignesh in place of Vikram. Just touching back on the customer agreements, I know you guys talked about it. I was curious on any updates on the active customer negotiations. I believe you guys mentioned there's about 10 advanced discussions last quarter or so. And what categories kind of these are focused on? I know you guys are focused on hyperscalers, utilities, but anything outside of that, any color on that would be great.

Yeah, we're in discussions with the US government. Somebody commented earlier about the Department of Defense. They have an interest in doing utilities. We're focused on some of the utilities. And they'd like to see their licensed site. They'd like to see the hyperscalers come onto their facility. So, you know, again, as I stated in earlier calls, it's a complex financial transaction. You're dealing with the utility owner or the owner in general. And our case, the owner is intro one, who's in negotiations with these entities to bring hyperscalers, to bring the Department of Defense. And so we're kind of across the board. We're one thing we're finding is that we do have ongoing Romania. There's a lot of interest in outside this country right now, but we're finding within the United States, we have limited resources. So we're really laser focused in on closure on maybe one or two sites or one or two customers.

Now may be a good time to maybe define this a little bit more clearly. I know we have some some newer analysts on the line and we have so long to like Mark Bianchi. Mark, you've been with us since day one. I think you've seen the development of our business model. But it's important to remember when we say when we talk about our customers, enter one is our customer and to one is the developer of power plants. There are intro and power plants with new scale and size like by computer with like an Intel chip or the Intel chip inside, in this case in the power plant. So we're hand in glove with intro one. Like I don't sell, you know, we talk about discussions, the utility, the hyperscaler and the military, the US government. Those are all end users, but we don't sell electrons. Right. So so like I want to kind of reset and kind of level the idea that we sell NPM, new scale power modules, those power modules going to the plant. Inter one develops the plant. They may own and operate the plant. There's different business models, but it's an intro one plant. Enter one sells the energy to the customer, whether it be, you know, utility or government or military, whomever it is, enter one has been out there trying to PPA and selling the power. So it's just just so we kind of craft this correctly. I want the market to understand what the story is and what the business model is, because that business model, the fact that we have enter one as our developer is a differentiator. Right. We're not out here trying to develop technology, develop power plants, PPAs. That's that's that's a huge pull. We're a tech company. We develop technology, technology for a new skill power module. New skill power module is built as a work on an OEM reseller. Sorry, not reseller, but we're OEM seller of a piece of equipment. We outsource that equipment. We outsource the production. We deliver it to enter on power plant. And it's one that puts in a power plant and then sells the power. And so so, you know, again, we talk about customers. Let's be clear. Again, I do this for some of our newer analysts. I think it's important. We have one customer that comes for enter one and one faces the market. They develop the power plants. They sell the power. We just sell the new skill power module where the internal size to the laptop. If you use that analogy or whatever analogy you want to use, but where the tech inside the power plant, we're not the power plant developers.

Yeah, that, that coincides what I said earlier that many of these entities, they don't necessarily want to, you know, the asset, they don't want to own nuclear. They just want 24 seven. So with our developer in their banking relationships and, and source of funding, they're able to offer a bill, don't transfer, build, don't operate, or be flexible enough to work out scenarios. That's that's providing solutions to these entities that Ramsey just mentioned.

Got it. That's super helpful. Thanks for the, thanks for the breakdown. Just one more question. If I'm, if I'm any, would you, would you be able to quantify kind of the progress on the phase two feed study through power and how the next steps kind of might look like in terms of timeline or any other developments around that? Thanks.

Yeah. Um, you know, as you know, we're, we're a floor corporation is the prime, uh, we're subcontractor floor, uh, role power and the remaining government, they continue to pay their bills and we're keeping our finger on the pulse and, you know, watching it very closely, we have ongoing almost weekly conversations on progress. They're, they're looking at their final notice to proceed. Now it looks to be probably in the timeframe of mid to late 26, early 27. So we continue to support floor as the prime providing the engineering requirements for the modules. And so far, so good.

Thank you for your questions. Our next question is from the line of Craig share with Toey brothers. Your line is life.

Hi, good afternoon and thanks for taking the questions. Um, um, um, Sharif's question and the answer about the supply chain having the ability to make up 20 modules annually. Uh, does that mean you have the ability to shoulder, uh, two orders somewhat concurrently of a 12 module and a six module order? Um, but you couldn't shoulder say two, two dozen orders simultaneously. Uh, and, and to the degree there's any, uh, you know, kind of competition in terms of getting into the customer on time by 2030, 2031, um, what kind of negotiation, discussion coordination do you have a venture one, if maybe you have a six module order ready to go, but that might slow down a 12 module order.

Now, you know, our, our model has always been predicated in the fact, you know, we, we manufacture in, in, uh, we manufacture our models in a factory. They're fungible assets with the intent to have multiple projects going at any given time. However, we're also very cognizant of our fact of what our capacity to execute is. So we don't want to get out over ski tips. But quite frankly, I just want one right now. I want to get a hard contract near term and we continue to build out our supply chain, which is critical for us. We have ongoing meetings because many of the suppliers, as you know, once you get the order book, they'll, they'll start gearing up and is produced on, we've got 12 modules coming online right now. Um, that's, you know, that's a gigawatt size plant and in our discussions with them, they're willing to tool up and even do more, uh, IHI and the other suppliers, but we're, we're limited to our supply chain and, uh, to get those modules. And that's why long lead items so critical. Anybody says they can get to 2030 COD, uh, without these long lead items. I don't see it as a possibility where we're still focused on getting modules in the ground by 2030 timeframe.

That, that, that's helpful. Um, so you, you know, you, you have mentioned, I believe historically that the, you know, you're on the hook if you don't get a customer, you know, covering it, uh, for over a couple hundred million dollars of tap backs the next couple of years on, on what you've already ordered. And then you just said you're going to be ramping off X and presumably having a, a wider cash burn. So is it fair to say that, um, this is Carpe Diem time that the second half of this year is a critical time to get signed, sealed and delivered customer commitment or two, uh, that can start shouldering some of this so you don't have to do it all on balance sheet.

Yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll take that question. Um, look, there's, you know, there's, there's a fine line to walk here as we're pushing forward. Um, you know, I, I often state that I don't wish to, and I don't think my, my shareholders wish for me to use their money to build an inventory of NPMs. That's not the way this goes. Um, and when I enter contracts, I enter contracts that have, um, you know, they have pathways out, they have pathways to score down, they have pathways to speed up and, you know, we do this and we enter it and we want to build these, you know, at least the long lead materials in relation to all the NPMs so that, so that we can expedite delivery of the first plant to a customer. Um, so it's not, you know, like I'm not, I'm not out there with this idea that I'm going to invest a billion dollars into, uh, you know, building new scale power modules, just on my own dime, absent in order. I think we're, you know, we, we have to, we, we refine that the dialogue a little more eloquently than that. Um, but we do invest into, into our LMS. We do want to speed up the process by which we can deliver. We want to invest in the supply chain. The suppliers don't, they're not, they're not sitting around quibbling their thumbs, they, they want to see orders. And the, you know, as I mentioned before in earlier question, you know, having our regulatory approval is one thing that's great and having to amazing. Excellent. The best of the best, but supply chain is also another tough nut to crack. You know, there's not, there's not a ton of, of, of, of nuclear suppliers worldwide, right? And America, especially, you know, the, the, the nuclear industry has been, has been stagnant for a long time. So, you know, for us, I think there's, there's a fine line there where we're activating our suppliers, working with them. We're investing in them and we're investing in their inventory. But, you know, as, as, as a, as a management team, you know, we also are very careful about shareholder funds and we're not, you know, we're not going to expect it's not like, oh yeah, I'm not going for broken H2 and just going to build as many as I can, that's not the way we operate a company, right? We, we take a more measured approach.

Fair enough. I appreciate the time.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

Our next question is from the line of Leanne Haddon with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is live.

Good evening, everyone. Thanks so much for taking my questions and congrats on the NRC upgrade approval.

Thank you.

Chris, Chris, just to start, I was curious if you've noticed any industry trends in terms of project financing. I'm just curious broadly, if you've noticed any sort of third party ecosystem or anything of that nature taking shape?

Uh, yeah. John, do you want to go or should I go with?

No, go ahead. I'm thinking on the question.

Yeah. Um, look, so, so, so we work again, like, I'll, you know, I'll take the opportunity to continue this kind of this distinction of, of the roles between use going into one and this kind of, you know, hand in glove sort of relationship that we have. Um, we don't finance projects at New Scale because we don't build projects. Um, you know, we build, we build a piece of equipment for a customer and the customer finances that, uh, through orders and through payments and we finance, you know, there may be some things that work in capital, but it's not project finance, um, but to get to your question, it doesn't mean we don't have visibility into, uh, into some of the discussions and the dialogue. And we've seen remarkably, you know, pretty significant interest from large scale US and, you know, even as like, you know, go, go out, look at, look at like what large pools of capital outside the country, some of our funds or others. We've seen significant interest from those groups and financing as, as kind of like scale, uh, scale capital outlay, scale investment team and financing projects for enter one using new scale technology. I think part of that comes down to the fact that we use, a, we're the only, like, you know, we're the only licensed technology and we got two of them. We use conventional fuel as light water reactor technology. It's everything that's commonly understood within the nuclear world. It's everything that financing wants. Plus it's built offsite in control environments without the complex nuclear fabrication in the field. So, so we see a ton of interest and we see it through it. And we talk about project finance interests. We see it through after one, you know, I see some of it just through the equity markets, right? I see people wanting to own you scale. I see, I see money coming into the, into the company, but also see when we go out and we talk to special customers, I've been to one coordination with that for one. We see these third party supporting those dialogues and that's, you know, I think that's something where, you know, this, this is what it takes to kind of reinvigorate nuclear America. These are big projects. They cost a lot of money. It's a scale infrastructure investment from very large sources of capital. And we're seeing them piling.

That's very interesting.

Yeah. And just to add to that, you know, we, as we stated in there, we have over $2 billion invested in this asset. A lot of that went to scaling up all the components within this model to where when you say first of a kind, the first of a kind really is you need to put one together and get it operational. The components themselves are typically as Ramsey said, conventional fuel, our skid mount, our, our turbine generators or skid mount units that are used in the oil patch. I mean, there's not really the helical coil steam generators have been scaled and tested in Viva Cenza, Italy and Doosan's building them currently. So I don't see where we are right now. I don't, I don't, from a supply chain, it's just that we got to be careful that we don't exceed expectations. Do we do what we say we can do? And we treat our suppliers fairly. We continue to build out our supply chain, which what we're doing right now.

Certainly. Yeah. Completely agree. Just one more from me. Of course, there's been a lot of exciting momentum domestically in the nuclear space, just curious if you're seeing any sort of similar trends internationally in terms of customer interest specifically.

Yeah, we do. I commented earlier, we're getting a lot of, you know, Finland, Sweden, you know, the, you're even seeing Germany's now talking about possibly reenergize and reactors because of, you know, energy requirements, but it gets back to where I'm saying right now, I would like to stay focused right on the U S base building out a U S supply chain. Um, in, you know, Romania is a great project that we have currently right now that we're working on in Romania as aspirations of being a provider of, uh, uh, best of March in central Eastern Europe. We hope we're part of that, but the whole groundswell, you know, desalinization, hydrogen production, none of that's gone away. In fact, it's ramping up and you know, we we're, we've been working on hydrogen for quite some time with some process companies about, and for hydrogen, it's really about the ability to get down to about a dollar 50 per kilogram. And we're making progress, but, um, again, our focus right now is with U S based customers, aside from Romania to get closure and near term deals.

Got

it. I would add that we, we, we just, I, I just received and we received great information all the time, but you know, it's a study of kind of us and their allies and the drivers for nuclear and kind of expectations, family gigawatts. They expect to see, you know, like, and I'm looking at this now, you know, people expect about demand for her gigawatts of nuclear by 2040, at least among America and her allies, um, uh, and the Euro area, probably about 40 gigs UK and Scandi probably about 16 gigs. And, and just for the reasons that John mentioned, you know, like reducing vulnerability, creating alternative energy supply and making with fuels and hydrogen. You know, for example, for the EU, from EU sources, higher reliability for power, um, all these ideas that, that, that just makes sense. And, you know, if we go, if we go to China and other parts of the world, you know, you have very significant numbers there as well, but we tend to focus on the U S and our allies here.

You know, we used to, for those, yeah, for those who have been following us, you know, it was only three, four years ago, we had customers asking for four module plants, six module plants. What we're hearing today, the more, the better it's 12 module plus. So it's an interest in, again, a lot of it is because of hyper-scalers, data centers and the energy requirements that even outside this country, we're seeing requests for a minimum of 12 module plants, which has been a shift over the last, I'd say two to three years.

Got it. That's very helpful, Coller. Thank you both.

Thank you. We have a final follow-up question for today from the line of Mark Bianchi with TD, TD Cohen. Excuse me. Please go ahead. Mark, are you there? Give you another, another line here. One second. I'll go back here. Mark, are you there?

I am. Can you hear me?

There you go. Go ahead, sir. Yes.

Thanks. Thanks for squeezing me back in, guys. John, I heard you comment on, in reference to the ROE Power project, that they would be, I think you said, looking at FID later in 26 or early 27. If I recall that, that's a little bit later than we'd previously talked about. Can you talk about what's going on there and when we should be kind of expecting the cost estimate and phase two feed to wrap up?

Yeah, we're, we're at about a cost class four estimate right now with floor. So we recently been informed that they're pushing it out a little bit, you know, and they're going to have a phased approach for a final investment decision. But we've been told their final notice to proceed is probably looking towards the latter part of 26. That we continue to move forward under their direction of floor, providing the engineering deliverables that they and the customer are requesting. So that's not all I know right now, Mark, in terms of what we've been told by the customer themselves. Okay. They're still very bullish on the project. It's just timing. Got it. Got it. Okay. Thanks

so much.

Thank you, Mark.

Operator, are we complete?

Don, I can't hear anything either. I hope it's not just you over on the line.

My apologies. We're here. We do have a final call, a final question from Brian Lee with Goldman Sachs. Go ahead, Brian, your line's live.

Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Thanks for squeezing me in. Apologies. I jumped on late. So some of this may be redundant, but I caught the last tail of the question right before me. Were you, could you provide us an update kind of on rope power timing and kind of what the milestones are? I thought that was one where originally you guys were maybe targeting as early as end of calendar 25 to see something kind of FID there, but can you give us the latest on where rope power stands? And then I had a follow up.

Yeah. Certainly. We just commented earlier that we are a subcontracted floor corporation. It's a prime. The customer, we've been working with them on a regular steady state basis, and we've been told that their final investment decision is a phased approach. However, final determination to proceed with the project is probably looking to be 26, later part of 26 is what we've been informed right now. That could change, but that's what we're working towards.

Okay. Fair enough. Presumably, and I think you guys have been public about targeting maybe a US based customer being your first to move forward sometime by the end of this year. That's still kind of the target and what are the latest discussions you're having with some of your key constituents on the US customer side of things. And then maybe if I could just squeeze one last one in, the Trump executive orders, obviously we've all gone through those. It seems like there's some action happening behind the scenes, things kind of moving forward, solicitations, et cetera. Could you kind of give us a bit of an update as to where your visibility stands around some of the executive orders and maybe where New Scale is best positioned to potentially see some benefits from those moving forward? Thank you.

Yeah. For us on executive orders, from an NRC perspective, as we've commented earlier, we did get our 77 power upgrade license. So much of what we're working with the NRC today is the construction operations license agreement and we're hopeful that through the executive orders, that process will streamline and we can obviously construct earlier, but from an operating perspective, we could hopefully streamline that and get in the ground quicker. As it relates to customers, we're getting inundated now. We're focused, as I said, with our resources working with our developer partner, InterOne, on two or three major customers that were still forecast in having what I call hard contracts in place by the end of this year, 2025. And those are all US-based customers.

Super helpful. Thank you, guys. I'll

pass it on. Thank you for your questions and ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude our Q&A session here for today. I would like to turn it back to Mr. Hopkins for any closing comments.

Yeah, thank you, Albrecht. Again, New Scale continues to make strides towards deploying our technology. And as I commented earlier, with strong tailwinds that are back, we believe we are well positioned to meet increasing global energy demands with safe, reliable, and sustainable energy. And right now, as I stated again, those tailwinds appear to be pretty strong moving forward. So I'd like to thank all of you for your interest in New Scale and for joining us on this call today. Until next time. Thanks.