Fusion power startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised $863 million from a long list of investors that includes Nvidia, Google, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and more.
“We’re continuing our trend here of looking into the world and saying, ‘How do we advance fusion as fast as possible?’” co-founder and CEO Bob Mumgaard told reporters in a call this week. “This round of capital isn’t just about fusion just generally as a concept, but it’s about how do we go to make fusion into a commercial industrial endeavor.”
The Massachusetts-based company has raised nearly $3 billion to date, the most of any fusion startup. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) previously raised a $1.8 billion round in 2021.
Fusion power has long been promised as a nearly limitless energy source, though it wasn’t until recently that investors considered it a bet worth placing. As advances in computing and AI have quickened the pace of research and development, the sector has become a hotbed of startup and investor activity.
Inside a fusion reaction, atoms are compressed and heated until they form a fourth state of matter known as plasma. When the plasma reaches the right temperature and pressure, those atoms begin to fuse, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process.
CFS is currently building a prototype reactor called Sparc in a Boston suburb. The company expects to turn that device on later next year and achieve scientific breakeven in 2027, a milestone in which the fusion reaction produces more energy than was required to ignite it.
Though Sparc isn’t designed to sell power to the grid, it’s still vital to CFS’s success.
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“There are parts of the modeling and the physics that we don’t yet understand,” Saskia Mordijck, an associate professor of physics at the College of William and Mary, told TechCrunch. “It’s always an open question when you turn on a completely new device that it might go into plasma regimes we’ve never been into, that maybe we uncover things that we just did not expect.”
Assuming Sparc doesn’t reveal any major problems, CFS expects to begin construction on Arc, its commercial-scale power plant, in Virginia starting in 2027 or 2028.
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