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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.

California-based TAE Technologies said on 8 April that it had raised an additional $280 million for its reactor-scale demonstration fusion facility to support the final step toward its commercialisation. The private fusion energy company announced a technology milestone by producing stable plasma at more than 50 million degrees Celsius in a proprietary compact reactor design that can scale to competitive fusion-generated power. “This milestone furthers confidence in TAE’s path to commercialisation,” the company said noting that the additional funding brings the total raised to more than $880 million “from some of the world’s most sophisticated investors”.