News

A private company betting on an innovative fusion technology announced today that its latest device can sustain high temperatures for long reaction times—a major step toward a reactor capable of producing more fusion energy than is consumed by the device. The company, TAE Technologies, is still far from that goal, which huge government efforts are also pushing toward. But its achievements so far have drawn $880 million in investment—more than any other private fusion company. The company also announced plans to scale up to a larger machine, which it hopes will reach fusion conditions by 2025.

TAE Technologies, a California-based firm building technology to generate power from nuclear fusion, said on Thursday it had raised $280 million from new and existing investors, including Google and New Enterprise Associates. The fresh capital will mostly be deployed towards further fusion work and a new reactor scale facility, the company said.

TAE Technologies Inc., a developer of nuclear fusion technology, raised $280 million to build a demonstration system after the company was able to produce superheated plasma at 50 million degrees Celsius (90 million degrees Fahrenheit), a key milestone in the effort to reproduce the power of stars to generate electricity on Earth. The company has now raised more than $880 million from backers including Google, Venrock Associates and Kuwait Investment Authority, TAE said in a statement Thursday. That’s more than any other company pursuing fusion, according to Chris Gadomski, nuclear analyst for BloombergNEF.

In a small industrial park located nearly halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, one company is claiming to have hit a milestone in the development of a new technology for generating power from nuclear fusion. The 20-year-old fusion energy technology developer TAE Technologies said its reactors could be operating at commercial scale by the end of the decade, thanks to its newfound ability to produce stable plasma at temperatures over 50 million degrees (nearly twice as hot as the sun).

TAE Technologies, the world’s largest private fusion company, has announced it will have a commercially viable nuclear fusion power plant by 2030, which puts it years—or even decades—ahead of other fusion technology companies. The California-based company has raised $880 million in funding for its hydrogen-boron reactor. This reactor isn’t a traditional tokamak or stellarator; instead, it uses a confined particle acceleration mechanism that produces and confines plasma.