The modern quest for Promethean fire is underway in an anonymous office park in Foothill Ranch, California, an hour southeast of Los Angeles. In the park, along a meandering drive, you will find a huge, modern warehouse building with “TAE Technologies” emblazoned on the door. Inside, you will find a 100-foot-long, $200 million fusion-energy experiment named Norman. And in a second-floor office, upstairs from that looming machine, you will find the would-be Prometheus himself: Michl Binderbauer, TAE’s boyish-looking and relentlessly upbeat co-founder and CEO.
As CEO of TAE Technologies, the world’s largest private fusion reactor company, Michl Binderbauer is one of those who believes that fusion power could be on the near horizon – and is using artificial intelligence co-developed with Google to help make it a reality.
