Shares of nuclear energy company Oklo Inc. (NYSE: OKLO) surged 5.01% on Friday during the trading session, as investors piled back into the stock after analysts refuted claims that AI development could become drastically more energy efficient.

The rally came after Oklo and other nuclear power stocks fell earlier in the week on reports that DeepSeek, a new Chinese AI competitor, trained its language model at a fraction of the cost of major US AI providers like OpenAI. This sparked fears that the expected boom in electricity demand from AI companies may not materialize.

However, analysts at firms like Bernstein pushed back, saying the claims of training a powerful AI system for just $5 million were "not true" and likely failed to account for significant research and development costs beyond just computational resources. This reassured investors that established AI companies would still require massive amounts of energy for their data centers and model training.