Fusion's Next Race Is Over Superconducting Tape, Not Plasma

Résumé détaillé

The race to build the world’s first commercial fusion power plant has moved out of the physics lab and onto the factory floor. Private investors poured a record $4.48 billion into…

Alex Kimani is a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com.

The race to build the world’s first commercial fusion power plant has moved out of the physics lab and onto the factory floor. Private investors poured a record $4.48 billion into fusion last year, a 69% jump, bringing the industry’s total since 2021 to $14.24 billion. According to the Fusion Industry Association, 71% of the 56 private fusion companies it surveyed expect to deliver power to the grid by the 2030s.

The front-runners already have buyers, with Washington-based Helion signing a power purchase agreement with Microsoft in 2023 to deliver at least 50 megawatts by 2028, with financial penalties if it misses, and Constellation Energy (NASDAQ:CEG) is acting as power marketer. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised $4 billion and expects its SPARC reactor to reach scientific breakeven in 2027. It has sold half the output of its first commercial plant in Virginia to Google, and Eni has committed more than $1 billion for power from the same plant.

Europe is now spending to catch up, with Germany’s Proxima Fusion raising €411 million in July at a €2.4 billion valuation, Europe’s largest fusion round on record. On October 28 in Tokyo, with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in attendance, Proxima signed memoranda of understanding with two Japanese industrial partners. The agreement with Fujikura covers high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape, which is wound into the magnets that confine the plasma. The agreement with Kyoto Fusioneering expands work on gyrotrons, the devices that heat the plasma with high-power microwaves.

Proxima will explore industrial-scale HTS tape manufacturing in Germany with Fujikura, through a planned €140 million production facility in Lower Saxony that it hopes will make around 5,000 kilometers of tape a year by 2030.

Fujikura, a 141-year-old company with more than 50,000 employees, built its reputation in…

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