No one has made fusion power viable yet. Why is Big Tech investing billions?

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But tech companies and investors are pouring billions into these companies, encouraged by breakthroughs they contend have placed a sustained fusion reaction tantalizingly within reach. China also factors into their urgency, with a government-sponsored effort there that is putting the West at risk of losing the global competition.

Scientists dreaming of fusion are no longer toiling in the shadows. They are being courted by governors, billionaires and tech behemoths eager to get in on the ground floor of what they see as a transformative, carbon-free fusion economy.

“A lot of people thought we were chasing ghosts,” said Michl Binderbauer, at TAE Technologies, which has partnered with Google to build a fusion reactor in Southern California and is one of Commonwealth’s top rivals.

Now more than $8 billion in mostly private money has been invested in fusion start-ups, most of it in the past four years.

“This really has the ability to change the world,” said Genevieve Kinney, a partner at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm that late last year led a $900 million round of funding for a young company called Pacific Fusion. “If it happens, the outcomes are massive. It could replace many of the technologies we use today.”

The current and former Energy Department secretaries are boosting its promise. “Fusion has hit that tipping point where things are going to happen fast,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a student of fusion decades ago at MIT who ultimately became an oil and gas CEO, said at a conference in Washington this month.

While Trump officials have scaled back support for wind and solar energy, Wright has touted fusion because if harnessed, it would produce power without regard to weather or time of day. Fusion also is supported by one of Wright’s predecessors, Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist himself who was once skeptical it could be commercialized.

To be sure, nobody is promising a miracle overnight. The industry is grappling with the huge challenge of sustaining a fusion reaction, a massive, costly undertaking that could require materials that have yet to be invented. The most optimistic companies talk about getting power on the grid within the next decade, but they caution that electricity from early plants will be very expensive and limited. Skeptics warn that it could take at least another decade or two. But federal and state officials are already beginning to plan for the day fusion power becomes reality.

The views of some fusion skeptics began to shift after government scientists in late 2022 used giant lasers to generate a reaction that produced more energy than went into creating it. That reaction lasted just a fraction of a second. But it proved that fusion was achievable, shifting the quest to an engineering challenge to create a lasting reaction, contain it and channel it into usable power.

The forecasts for electricity demand around the world in the coming decades dwarf what experts say energy companies can deliver using current technologies. Much of the demand is driven by the intense energy needs of the artificial intelligence industry, motivating some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies to embed themselves in the fusion moonshot, engaging their AI machinery in the effort to get fusion power out of the lab and onto the power grid.

TAE, for example, is so closely collaborating with Google on its work that the Silicon Valley tech giant has a virtual control room on its campus enabling it to engage with the fusion firm’s experiments.

“They have access to all the data,” said Binderbauer, a physicist who founded TAE more than a quarter-century ago. “It’s like a marriage. There are very few secrets left. The upshot is that they are partnering deeper with us.”

It’s a radically different landscape than when Binderbauer launched the company.

Now, Moniz sits on TAE’s board, and Google and Chevron are major investors. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is the executive chairman of West Coast fusion firm Helion Energy, which has inked an agreement to supply Microsoft with electricity if it gets a plant up and running.

Worries that China will win the fusion race are also giving US firms a boost. China is building what experts believe will be one of the most powerful fusion reactors in the world, bigger than the US government facility near Berkeley, California. As with US efforts, the project is focused on advancing nuclear weapon design, as fusion reactors can be used to simulate the conditions of a nuclear explosion.

China is now investing substantially more public funds in fusion than the United States is. The risk is that fusion power could be one more US energy innovation, like solar panels and electric-car batteries, that stalls out here amid a lack of public investment, enabling China to monopolize the industry and its supply chains.

“The winner in the fusion race will be the country that can build these plants at scale and do it around the world,” said Jimmy Goodrich, a nonresident fellow at the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. He said China is well positioned, as it is vastly outpacing the United States in building traditional nuclear fission reactors — which power today’s legacy nuclear plants using technology that splits atoms, rather than fusing them – with 27 under construction compared with zero in America.

“The speed and scale at which they are moving is remarkable,” Goodrich said. “They can apply that to fusion, and we are left in the dust.”

Germany, Japan and Britain are also racing to build the world’s first fusion power plant.

In the United States, companies are jockeying with one another, sharing some scientific findings and technologies but also making bold claims that their specific approach is superior and most likely to succeed.

TAE claims to have the “cleanest and safest approach to commercial fusion power.” It is conceptually similar to that of Commonwealth Fusion’s magnet configuration, called a tokamak, but is designed to use different fuel and operate at lower temperatures.

Commonwealth arguably has a leg up, having brokered a deal with Virginia to locate its first fusion plant near Richmond, with the aim of selling 400 megawatts of power by the early 2030s. It is enough electricity to power a sizable data center.

The firm spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its Massachusetts magnet factory, which also helps supply the experiments of other fusion companies. Among them is Type One Energy, which in February signed an agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility, to build a 350-megawatt fusion power plant called Infinity Two on the grounds of a retired coal-powered generating station.

Infinity Two would be powered by what is called a stellarator, which the company says will be able to sustain a fusion reaction without needing to invent new materials to handle the heat and energy intensity involved, because it will operate at lower temperatures. Equipment breakdown is one of the biggest challenges fusion faces, as generating energy for even a few seconds can destroy the machinery creating that energy.

“If you have a promising approach but you still need to invent new materials, the hard reality is you are not going to be putting fusion energy on the grid in 10 years,” said Christofer Mowry, CEO of Type One.

Other companies aren’t using magnets, instead taking the giant-laser approach used by the US government at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, where scientists have eight times since late 2022 generated a fusion reaction that expelled more energy than it consumed, known as “ignition.”

The costs are so high and engineering challenges so extreme that one of the most prominent US fusion experts, Harvard physicist and former White House science adviser John Holdren, said in an interview that “it is extremely unlikely we will see fusion power on the grid much before 2050.”

It took scientists 70 years to reach ignition, Holdren said, and developing the engineering capabilities required to sustain that reaction is just as difficult. “We are just miles short of the conditions a practical reactor would require,” he said.

Victor Gilinksy, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has also warned that companies are vastly downplaying the huge hurdles they have yet to overcome. Michel Claessens, former communications director for ITER, an international effort to advance fusion science, says the industry is misleading the public with its promises that fusion energy is within sight.

But scientists engaged in the chase say those views are outdated. “Investors who spend even a cursory amount of time looking into this are coming away thinking there is a path here,” said Bob Mumgaard, an MIT scientist who co-founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Still, fusion energy is now where the auto industry would be if it had unlocked the formula for building an internal combustion engine before metal had been invented, said Greg Piefer, CEO of Shine Technologies, a fusion firm in Wisconsin. That makes it a risky business. Shine is using fusion neutrons to develop products such as imaging machines and medical isotopes, so it can stay solvent while trying to unlock commercial electricity.

Piefer is acutely aware that no fusion company is going to profitably sell electricity before it reaches what is known as scientific “break-even” — the point at which the fusion reaction generates more energy than is needed to ignite it. The only place in the United States that has happened is at the government facility at Livermore — which is the size of three football fields and uses a laser pulse that for a billionth of a second shoots more energy than the entire US power grid 2,500 times over.

“It is pennies worth of heat for millions of dollars in,” Piefer said. “There are still a lot of factors to overcome.”