This Week’s Fusion News: July 17, 2026

Energy Industry

With wait times for large gas turbines now exceeding five years, Arbor Energy, founded by former SpaceX engineers, has raised a $55M Series A to advance its 25 MW modular Halcyon turbines, which combine rocket turbopump technology, a supercritical CO2 power cycle, and 3D-printed core components. The company has also secured an order from GridMarket for up to 200 units, reportedly worth billions of dollars.

Fusion Energy

Proxima Fusion raised 411 million euros ($468 million) led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures with Google and RWE as strategic investors, a 2.4 billion euro valuation that makes it Europe’s best funded fusion company. Spring Valley and General Fusion shareholders approved the merger that lists General Fusion on Nasdaq as GFUZ, the first publicly traded pure play fusion company. UKAEA and Eni launched RH3OVA, a joint venture selling consultancy and operational services to the global fusion industry. And China completed final tests on the world’s largest superconducting fusion magnet, a 582 ton coil built entirely with domestic supply chains. Plus Helical Fusion signs a construction MoU for Helix KANATA, and Cosylab CEO Mark Plesko on why control systems are the missing backbone of commercial fusion.

Fusion Supply Chain

The Fusion Report interviews Mark Pleško, CEO of Cosylab, a 250-person Slovenian company that has built control systems for ITER, UKAEA, and major research labs for over two decades. Pleško explains why fusion startups tend to treat controls as a problem to solve later, what that technical debt costs them, and how the Fusionics initiative co-founded with UKAEA aims to give the industry a standard control framework.

Fusion Energy

Helical Fusion has added a long-established Japanese general contractor to its Helix Program as an Official Partner and signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate toward the construction of Helix KANATA, the company’s fusion pilot plant targeted for the 2030s. The two firms will examine construction requirements and project execution approaches for future fusion power facilities. The contractor joins the earlier Official Partners announced in April 2026 in building out the industrial foundation for commercial fusion in Japan.

Fusion Energy

The Fusion Industry Association’s fourth annual supply chain report found fusion supply chain spending rose 24 percent in 2025 to $538 million, launched at the industry’s first supply chain trade show in Santa Fe. General Fusion signed a framework agreement with Italy’s Renexia to site and build commercial Magnetized Target Fusion plants. nT-Tao’s Q2 update logged more than 1,000 experiments and launched a fusion power barge project with ABS and Siemens Energy. LLNL found that circularly polarized lasers could save optics at NIF. The Fusion Report also covers CFS becoming the first international partner in the UKAEA’s £220 million LIBRTI tritium program and Realta’s first-ever direct conversion of plasma energy into electricity by a private fusion company. Plus the tracker at 24 companies and $11.4B in disclosed funding.

Fusion Energy

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has become the first international partner in the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s LIBRTI program, a £220 million effort to demonstrate net tritium production for fusion power plants. The two organizations will jointly design the experimental setup and run investigations at a new facility being built at UKAEA’s Culham Campus, which will draw on a high-flux neutron source from Shine Technologies. CFS, which describes itself as the best-funded fusion company with more than $3 billion raised, will build the test articles used to validate the tritium breeding blanket design for its ARC power plant planned for Virginia. Tritium breeding blankets are a shared engineering challenge across fusion approaches, and cross-company collaboration on the technology is becoming more common as the industry moves toward first-of-a-kind machines.

Fusion Energy

Realta Fusion demonstrated direct energy conversion (DEC) of plasma kinetic energy into electricity at the WHAM fusion machine at UW-Madison, drawing current at about 100 volts to light several bulbs. The company describes it as the first such demonstration by a commercial fusion company and points to DEC as a way to raise efficiency and lower cost in its planned mid-2030s plants.

AI, Data Centers

The AI data center buildout is pushing up costs well beyond electricity and water. A recent study finds it is also raising the price of construction materials and skilled labor while absorbing capital that non-data-center projects, including commercial fusion, are competing for. The Fusion Report looks at who pays, who benefits, and what the $6.7 trillion data center forecast means for fusion’s race for investment.