Trump Media — yup, the parent company of Truth Social — is the latest entrant in the near century-long race to develop a nuclear fusion power plant. It announced a merger agreement with fusion company TAE Technologies on Thursday, and a bold plan to break ground on the first utility-scale fusion plant some time in 2026.
TAE doesn’t plan to start generating power from its first plant until 2031, which is still an incredibly ambitious timeline. There will likely be a myriad of financial and regulatory issues to contend with along the way, of course. But the scientific and engineering challenges to overcome, which we’ll dive into here, are also enormous.
Fusion is considered the ‘Holy Grail’ of clean energy technologies
Fusion is considered the ‘Holy Grail’ of clean energy technologies, and AI companies are salivating over it as a potential source of abundant electricity for data centers. But while a future fusion reactor might one day help solve some of humanity’s headaches, it could just be wishful thinking to expect them to come to the rescue for data centers anytime soon.
Why would Trump Media care about fusion?
With fusion, scientists are trying to replicate the way stars create light and heat — atomic nuclei fuse together, generating a tremendous amount of energy. A fusion power plant could avoid the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels that are causing climate change, as well as the radioactive waste that today’s nuclear fission reactors create by splitting atoms apart to produce energy.
Big names in tech are funneling money into fusion in the hopes that it might become a silver bullet for everyone’s energy woes. Google and Microsoft have announced agreements to purchase electricity from fusion power plants that other companies plan to complete by the late 2020s or 2030s. Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos have also backed startups developing their own fusion technologies.
“Fusion power will be the most dramatic energy breakthrough since the onset of commercial nuclear energy in the 1950s — an innovation that will lower energy prices, boost supply, ensure America’s AI supremacy, and revive America’s manufacturing base, and bolster national defense,” Devin Nunes, Trump Media Chairman and CEO, said on a Thursday investor call.
There are no utility scale nuclear fusion power plants yet, despite the rush of initiatives to design one that might actually work. Success still depends on researchers solving significant scientific and engineering unknowns that they’ve been plugging away at for decades.
How do we know TAE and Trump Media can actually make fusion power plants a reality?
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