Frankie Berry

Commonwealth Fusion Systems signed a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for up to $85 million in CHIPS R&D funding to develop semiconductors for fusion power plants, part of four letters totaling up to $389 million, and Blue Laser Fusion closed a capital raise and alternative public offering with total proceeds of $34 million. Helical Fusion and Germany’s Gauss Fusion signed a joint statement of intent to advance stellarator fusion power commercialization, while Proxima Fusion signed MoUs with Fujikura on HTS tape manufacturing in Germany and with Kyoto Fusioneering on gyrotrons and fuel cycle technologies, and Kyoto Fusioneering signed a separate MoU with Focused Energy. The Fusion Report also published an analysis of whether the AI bubble will burst and what that would mean for the economy, and the sixth article in its series on critical supporting technologies for commercial fusion, covering pulsed power systems and impedance-matched Marx generators.

Helion signed a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for up to $175 million in CHIPS R&D funding to develop high-voltage semiconductors for its fusion systems, Israel’s Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure published a draft national fusion strategy that weighs public investment of up to NIS 2 billion (about $647 million), Cambridge Heavy Industries raised a $6.2 million seed round, NeoVolta launched a $40 million third-party-ownership financing platform, Startorus Fusion reported a record 63 T/s magnet field change rate, and Stellios Technologies emerged from stealth with a $5 million pre-seed round. The Fusion Report also published an analysis of why natural gas is the largest source of power for US data centers through 2030, and a look at UK startup Zenithon’s AI world models for extreme physics.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems was selected to lead a 10-partner, AI-enabled digital twin project for SPARC in the second phase of DOE’s Genesis Mission, Germany’s SPRIND launched a milestone-based fusion program with €500 million (about $560 million) available through 2029, General Fusion reported electron temperatures above 1 keV on its LM26 machine, and DOE approved Zap Energy’s fusion capacitor design and first prototype under the Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. The Fusion Report also published a review of what the small modular reactor scorecard says about the US-China fusion race, and the fifth article in its series on technologies that support commercial fusion, covering plasma heating and diagnostics.

Xcimer Energy received up to $30.5 million more from the DOE Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, Helical Fusion completed a JPY 3.23 billion (about $20.6 million) Series B second close as Fuji Electric joined as an investor and Official Helix Program Partner, and Zenithon raised $10 million to build AI world models for extreme physics including fusion reactors. The Fusion Report also covered the DIII-D team’s APS John Dawson Award for negative triangularity work and Type One Energy’s $200M Series B, with an interview with co-founder Dr. John Canik.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems agreed to buy more than 10,000 kilometers of HTS tape from Japan’s Fujikura, an order CFS calls the largest of its kind, to support ARC power plants starting with the Fall Line Fusion Power Station in Virginia. ENN Group reported hydrogen-boron fusion reactions on its EXL-50U device, and Helical Fusion said it will begin preliminary power-on tests of its Helix HARUKA demonstration reactor in 2027. A DIII-D team won the American Physical Society’s John Dawson Award for advancing negative triangularity, while California enacted SB 925 requiring a state strategic plan for fusion and Italy’s Senate gave final approval to a framework for nuclear fission and fusion. The Fusion Report also interviewed Helion Energy CEO Dr. David Kirtley about the Orion ramp and continued its series on power conversion and fuel management systems for commercial fusion.

This week House Science Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren and Subcommittee Chair Jay Obernolte introduced the bipartisan American Leadership in Fusion Act, which would provide $10 billion to commercialize fusion energy, led by $3.8 billion for materials and fuel cycle test facilities, $3 billion for a new milestone-based demonstration program, and $2 billion for the existing milestone program. Israeli compact fusion company nT-Tao signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Orion Nuclear Energy Corporation, which will act as its U.S. project development and commercialization partner to site, finance, and permit nT-Tao’s 20 MW Compact Fusion System at data centers and other high-load facilities. China’s ENN Group broke ground on Helong-2, a hydrogen-boron fusion platform in Hebei Province that it expects to begin experiments by the end of 2027 and to generate first hydrogen-boron fusion electricity in 2030. Proxima Fusion and the State of Lower Saxony agreed to build Europe’s first large-scale fusion-grade HTS tape factory, with around €140 million planned for the first two phases through 2029 and €21 million committed by the state. Featured this week from The Fusion Report: why fusion companies such as Inertia are recruiting systems engineers and other talent from semiconductor, aerospace, and utility backgrounds. Plus an analysis of where Elon Musk is right and wrong about solar, storage, and the case for commercial fusion.

This week Inertia Enterprises reported that ignition-benchmarked simulations run with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory show its commercial laser indirect drive target design achieves more than 25x gain, enough fusion energy to generate between 250 MWe and 1.3 GWe of grid electricity, with the paper posted to arXiv ahead of peer-reviewed submission. Commonwealth Fusion Systems ran the full cryogenic system for its SPARC tokamak at its 8 kelvin operating temperature, a commissioning milestone ahead of an integrated dry dress rehearsal of SPARC’s support systems and a preview of the equipment its ARC power plant will need. The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory signed a Joint Declaration of Intent at the Global Fusion Policy Summit in London to explore federating UKAEA’s £45 million SUNRISE supercomputer with PPPL’s STELLAR-AI platform so both laboratories can train shared AI models on data from MAST Upgrade and NSTX-U. Israeli compact fusion company nT-Tao deployed a 50 MW pulsed-power subsystem built from 50 roughly 1 MW Power Electronic Generators with real-time nonlinear control, a five-fold scale-up meant to push its C3 prototype beyond 1.5 million degrees Celsius. Featured this week from The Fusion Report: Helion’s slide of full Orion output to 2029 or 2030 and what the FY2027 Department of Energy budget request means for fusion, plus the third article in the supporting technologies series on divertors and heat exhaust systems.

PACMAN, a new AI framework that reads real-time plasma measurements and issues fusion tokamak control commands in about 20 milliseconds, tested across five experiments on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility. RTX Ventures made a minority investment in laser fusion company Xcimer Energy and signed a teaming agreement to explore integrating Xcimer’s pulsed-laser technology into RTX defense systems aimed at defeating airborne threats. The Fusion Industry Association’s UK director gave evidence to Parliament’s Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee on the National Policy Statement for fusion energy generation, ahead of next week’s Global Fusion Policy Summit. Featured this week from The Fusion Report: Thea Energy published the preconceptual design for Helios, its commercial stellarator power plant designed to deliver approximately 400 megawatts of electricity to the grid using software-controlled magnet coils.

This week Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry conditionally selected four private sector fusion demonstration projects, spanning laser, stellarator, field reversed configuration, and tokamak approaches, for a program expected to provide roughly JPY 60 billion in milestone based subsidies through 2028. The Fusion Industry Association published a white paper guiding Agreement States on preparing to license and oversee commercial fusion facilities under the byproduct materials framework. South Korea named fusion one of seven strategic growth engines, targeting a homegrown fusion reactor by 2035 and commercial power in the 2040s, with the government taking equity stakes through public private special purpose companies. Featured this week from The Fusion Report: Michael Heumann on the OpenAI agents that escaped an evaluation sandbox and intruded into Hugging Face’s production systems, the twin stories of Tennessee’s first fusion license for Type One Energy and Realta Fusion’s partnership with Madison Gas and Electric to explore a 200 MWe plant, and an examination of what fusion fuel really costs and how it gets into the machine.

Things You Gotta Know Shine Technologies Preps an IPO With Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan as Bookrunners Axios reported that fusion developer Shine Technologies is preparing to file for an initial...