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Google, the search giant owned by parent company Alphabet, has partnered with TAE since 2014, providing the fusion startup with artificial intelligence and computational power. But this marks Google’s first cash investment in TAE.

Our current domestic electrical grids are woefully inept to integrate necessary renewable energy sources. The answer to solving this problem lies within a new approach to energy use: one that focuses on optimizing the way customers and their technologies interact with the grid. 

Reporting on challenges with tritium fuel for fusion, Science notes TAE Technologies has “decided to simply forgo tritium” to “use plain hydrogen and boron.” TAE’s hydrogen-boron fusion will “require higher temperatures than [deuterium-tritium], but the [company thinks] that’s a price worth paying to avoid tritium hassles” and produce the cleanest, safest fusion reaction.

Michl Binderbauer has made an audacious promise. Within the next decade, his company, TAE Technologies, will create a nuclear fusion reactor that delivers energy to the power grid.
“It’s not false confidence,” said Binderbauer, the CEO of TAE. “The building blocks we need — they’re coming.”

Google-backed TAE Technologies, which has raised $880m (£650m), predicts its reactors will be commercialized within ten years. In experiments, the company has already reached more than 50 million degrees Celsius, and a new prototype will operate at more than 100 million degrees Celsius. “Our livelihoods depend on delivering – or we’re gone,” says Michl Binderbauer, chief executive of TAE Technologies, which has operated since 1998.