Where does fusion fit in the new American industrial supercycle? Is it the capstone, or does it arrive after the cycle is built on gas and fission?
The fusion industry stands right now at the transition from science to engineering, from the lab to the marketplace. We've seen tens of billions invested over decades into national lab infrastructure and experiments worldwide that have laid the groundwork for understanding plasma physics. We're confident that when we build the next machine, it's going to work. So that means you have to build the next machine, and what the private sector brings is the discipline and resources to build it in a commercially viable way.
Fusion is a fundamental change in how humanity intersects with energy. Before fusion, energy is something you take from the ground or chop down trees for, geographically located, and even renewables depend on weather.
Fusion becomes essentially a manufactured good: the more energy you need, the more machines you manufacture, with limitless and abundant fuel.
Multiple companies are now building proof-of-concept machines, with pilot plants producing the first commercial energy in the early 2030s, making that decade the period of scale-up and commercialization. That puts us on a similar timeframe to other emerging baseload technologies like carbon capture, hydrogen, and advanced nuclear.
So fusion isn't perennially thirty years away anymore?
The difference now is that the resources have come behind it. Congress passed the Fusion Energy Act of 1980 saying there would be fusion power on the grid by 2000, but they never funded it. Any scientific breakthrough is a function of time, technology, and resources, and back then you could have brute-forced it with more resources, but the technology wasn't there.
Now technology has moved forward and resources are following. The private sector has added over $10 billion into companies working to commercialize this. That's a big deal and will really drive things forward.
China has spent around $7 billion on fusion since 2023, triple the U.S. federal spend. Which model gets to commercial deployment first?
It's all to play for, and it's hard to say right now which trajectory gets there first. But we should be careful about framing this purely as U.S. versus China. The framing instead needs to be the global commercial sector within the G7 and the broader commercialized West. I see a coalition of the ambitious emerging: the U.S., Japan, UK, Germany, with smaller players like Singapore, the UAE, and Canada potentially joining. These countries can align public-sector national lab infrastructure alongside private-sector leaders, and governments have a critical role in providing infrastructure-level support to get initial pilot plants over the valley of death.
There's a real chance that without that government support, China wins the race. What's also interesting is that China could come second or third in the race but win the supply chain, and by winning the supply chain they dominate the real industry, just as they came to dominate solar and batteries. They didn't win the race to commercial solar or commercial batteries, but they now dominate through supply chain control and industrial-scale manufacturing. If we focus only on who gets to the moon first and not who charges tickets to go to the moon, we could lose this.
That international dimension is reflected in how the FIA has expanded. How is this international effort organized?
We have a memorandum of understanding with a partner association in Japan called JFusion, which represents private-sector companies there, and we work very closely with them. We have people in the UK and Brussels, plus partnerships with another association in Germany. It's important to have these multiple countries pulling in the same direction and supporting their own companies.
It's competition and collaboration at once. You want to encourage competition because that's what drives things forward in the private sector, you have to be racing to beat your competitors. But the countries also have to know they're racing against China, the second-largest economy in the world.
You've proposed something like a Fusion CHIPS Act. What does that look like in numbers and legislation?
The CHIPS Act was $54 billion. Our plan is for a $10 billion infrastructure investment in the United States over ten years. Other countries can come in at their own level: Germany has put in 2.5 billion euros of new money by 2029. The legislative model is similar to how the CHIPS Act passed Congress, both authorization, which is a policy bill, and appropriations, run through the Department of Energy using a milestone-based approach.
What that means is the Department of Energy funds private companies to build things, but the money only comes when it's actually built. This is how SpaceX was funded through NASA. We talk about SpaceX as a great private-sector approach, but it wouldn't have gotten off the ground without that NASA support. The $10 billion splits evenly: half goes to milestone-based support for private-sector companies building power plants, half to national lab infrastructure for test stands, facilities, and the research knowledge that drives this forward.
The TAE-Google deal recasts fusion as compute fuel rather than green energy. Is hyperscaler demand a healthy signal, or is it too early to tie the industry to one customer?
You have to have a diversified buyer base, and ultimately the buyers will be the grid in general. But this is really a signal of importance. The United States moved from a world of essentially flat electricity demand since 2006, almost two decades, which actually helped enable an energy transition because you could swap clean technologies in for coal. Since 2023, demand has started ticking up and will only grow significantly more, driven by data centers, AI, and crypto. That's what makes fusion deployable in the United States at scale.
If you'd asked me when we started the FIA in 2021, I would have said American companies would build it but sell it in Japan, East Asia, or Central and Eastern Europe, places with expensive electricity and no indigenous supply. That's not the case anymore. As a Dominion Energy ratepayer in Virginia, where many data centers are, my electricity prices have gone up significantly. Hyperscalers are paying above the market rate. The early power purchase agreements from Microsoft and Google are above market because they know the value of always-on, low-carbon energy. Financing is difficult when nobody has ever bought your product before, so having an assured buyer unlocks new financing. That's really valuable.
What moves utilities from curiosity to actual procurement, and when does that happen?
They're already writing checks to the association. TVA, Southern Company, NextEra, and Dominion are members. Overseas, Chubu in Japan and OPG in Canada are members. These major companies are joining the FIA to test the water and learn what's coming because they know they need to be involved. Dominion is partnering with Commonwealth to build their pilot plant in Richmond, Virginia. TVA is partnering with Type One Energy in Tennessee. RWE and Proxima are partnering in Germany.
Are they writing big checks yet? Utilities are the most small-c conservative businesses in the world. They don't like to do new things, and they don't write checks if they can help it. They're waiting for ratepayers, and they have many stakeholders to balance, including the obligation to keep electricity prices low. There's an important balance there, but they're coming in and getting involved.
