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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.

So far, Norman has produced vortices with temperatures of 3.5m°C that last around ten milliseconds, rather than the microseconds of a conventional frc. TAE hopes, by the end of this year, to have increased that temperature to around 30m°C, and tripled the plasma’s lifetime. All of which is clever. But what makes the firm’s approach special is that it plans to eschew deuterium and tritium in favour of normal hydrogen (the nucleus of which is a lone proton) and boron.

Last year, a panel of advisers to the US Department of Energy published a list of game-changers that could “dramatically increase the rate of progress towards a fusion power plant.” The list included advanced algorithms, like artificial intelligence and machine learning. It’s a strategy that TAE Technologies is banking on: the 20-year-old startup began collaborating with Google a few years ago to develop machine learning tools that it hopes will finally bring fusion within reach.