This Week’s Fusion News: July 31, 2026

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.

Fusion Supply Chain

As fusion energy moves closer to commercial deployment, The Fusion Report is expanding its coverage of the fusion supply chain. This piece profiles E&P Technologies, a Melbourne, Florida startup building high voltage pulsed power capacitors for fusion and aerospace, and includes an interview with co-founder and CEO Caroline Sorrick on US manufacturing and how rapidly evolving fusion requirements affect suppliers.

Fusion Energy

Helion Energy secured the licenses needed to operate a fusion power plant, clearing the way for its Orion plant in Malaga, Washington. General Atomics will collaborate with the DOE to design the first full-scale fusion blanket test facility. General Fusion’s roughly $1 billion merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III cleared SEC review, with a shareholder vote set for July 6. Type One Energy added former bp CEO Bernard Looney to its board, and Inertia formed a Science and Technology Advisory Board. The Fusion Report also looks at China EAST’s run at 2027 ignition, asks whether data centers belong in space, and refreshes its Top Fusion Companies by Funding tracker at $11.4 billion across 24 companies.

China, Fusion Energy

China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), the record-setting “Artificial Sun” in Hefei, is now scheduled to attempt fusion ignition in 2027, a milestone reached only once before, by Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility in 2022. If successful, EAST would be the first to achieve ignition in a steady-state magnetic confinement device, though Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ SPARC is racing toward the same goal on the same timeline. The Fusion Report breaks down what ignition actually requires (the Lawson Criteria of temperature, density, and confinement time) and assesses how close each machine really is. EAST leads on pathfinding plasma physics while SPARC targets Q > 1, but neither has yet crossed into a self-heating burning plasma. The bigger question: would a 2027 ignition milestone finally ignite broad investor interest across the fusion sector?