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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.

A US company is speeding up the path to practical fusion energy by using Google’s vast computing power. By applying software that can improve on its own, TAE Technologies has cut down tasks that once took two months to just a few hours. Google has lent the firm its expertise in “machine learning” in order to help accelerate the timeline for fusion. “I want to deliver fusion first, but anyone who does it is a hero,” TAE’s chief executive Dr Michl Binderbauer told BBC News.

With Google’s assistance using machine optimization and data science, TAE achieved the major goals for their fusion platform, Norman, which brings us a step closer to the goal of breakeven fusion. They have completed a design for an even more powerful machine, which they hope will demonstrate the conditions necessary for breakeven fusion before the end of the decade. TAE has succeeded with two complete machine builds during our collaboration, and we are really excited to see the third.

Recreating in a lab the nuclear reaction that powers the sun and other stars — which is called nuclear fusion — is a feat as complex as it sounds.
Fusion has the potential to create massive amounts of carbon-free or clean energy. So though no scientists have quite accomplished creating usable energy from fusion just yet, a handful of companies are working at it. The machines being built by scientists to accomplish this are called reactors, and they are massively heavy, cost tens of millions of dollars and represent the culmination of decades of scientific research. TAE Technologies, headquartered in Foothill Ranch, California, is a fusion company using a unique reactor design, and it recently reached a key milestone in the quest for usable energy from fusion.