CFS and the U.S. @CommerceGov have signed a letter of intent for a proposed $85 million award that would advance semiconductor research and development for fusion energy. The proposed award, under the CHIPS and Science Act, stands to boost both fusion commercialization and the processor manufacturing industry in the United States. The proposed award would fund a variety of semiconductor-related innovation that applies to fusion energy, including improvements to power electronics, radio frequency power generators, controller chips, robotic maintenance equipment, and artificial intelligence for fusion. “This award marks an important opportunity to drive development of semiconductors and power electronics unique to the fusion industry,” said @BobMumgaard, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. “These innovations will be a vital part of our global effort to deploy commercial fusion.” We expect the proposed award from the CHIPS Research and Development Office (CRDO) to bear fruit by attracting new suppliers and partners to the fusion sector. Building a more robust industrial base ultimately will help bring this clean, safe, nearly limitless form of energy to the power grid as fast as possible. #FusionEnergy

“We have a saying at CFS that in the future, the two markets that matter are energy and gray matter. It’s really human creativity and energy, and then the possibilities are endless.” That’s @BrandonSorbom, CFS Chief Science Officer and Co-Founder, speaking about the long-term potential of fusion energy at @TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 this week. Quality of life measurements rise with energy, he added: “If you look at literacy or infant mortality or life expectancy, they all correlate positively with energy use. So regardless of what we're applying the energy towards, there's always going to be a need for more energy.” #FusionEnergy #TechCrunchDisrupt

Q>1 is one of the most important milestones on the path to fusion power. But what does it actually mean? Alex Creely, Chief Engineer of ARC, breaks it down in simple terms. Fusion has the potential to unlock a huge amount of clean energy. But first, a fusion machine has to prove it can make more energy than it uses. That’s what Q>1 means. We put power into the machine to keep the fusion fuel incredibly hot, and Q>1 happens when the fusion reactions give off more power than we put in. It’s not the only thing a fusion power plant needs — but it’s a crucial first step. #FusionEnergy #Energy #Physics #Science

Through the U.S. Department of @ENERGY's Genesis Mission, fusion energy machines are about to get a lot smarter. CFS is the only private company leading a Genesis Mission Phase II project, directing a group of American companies, universities, and labs that’ll extend our work applying artificial intelligence and digital twin technology to our SPARC fusion demonstration machine. With decades of publicly funded fusion science data and the might of DOE supercomputers, we’ll be able to put faster AI technology to use. This phase of the Genesis Mission is designed to help expand the impact of projects with a demonstrated potential to benefit from AI and to improve the nation’s scientific capability. A digital twin is a sophisticated clone of real-world hardware, a 3D representation with two-way communication links that show what’s happening in the tokamak while also helping us control it. Building AI models into this digital twin adds ultrafast AI simulations, giving us new abilities to understand SPARC fusion pulses in just moments. That rapid learning will let us chart the best path to progress so we can deliver fusion energy to the grid as fast as possible. In effect, AI can serve as a co-pilot to run the machine, and the digital twin gives us a better flight simulator cockpit. DOE supercomputers will help us train AI models validated with data from decades of fusion research, helping to turn hours of plodding computer simulations into immediate insights. “This project will convert decades of R&D performed across the U.S. fusion community into tools that can be applied to accelerate SPARC operations,” said @BrandonSorbom, Chief Science Officer and Co-founder of CFS. “Together, our team of public and private leaders in AI and fusion will be able to unify and apply decades of U.S. research and tackle some of the fusion industry’s biggest challenges — creating new opportunities to move fusion to the grid faster.” The group we’re leading on this project also includes laboratories (@Livermore_Lab, @ORNL, @PPPLab, @SLAClab), universities (@CarnegieMellon, @MIT), and private companies (@GoogleDeepMind, @nvidia, @Synopsys, and @GeneralAtomics). #FusionEnergy #Energy

"SPARC was designed with the intent not to be connected to the grid but to have 13 of the 17 systems you need in a power plant to show the world that we have a near-scale fusion machine that can work as a power plant. The rest of the things we can work in parallel — we wanted to go on the fastest path possible." That's Jennifer Ganten, Chief Global Affairs Officer, chatting with Daniel Hewitt on the Everything Energy podcast from the @IEA, alongside other fusion observers. Jennifer and Dan discussed how the SPARC facility has become a beehive of daily activity with hundreds of people onsite. SPARC, our fusion demonstration machine, is now about 80% complete, and we anticipate turning it on next year. Tune into the podcast to learn more about our progress on SPARC and our parallel approach to working on the ARC power plant.

In a one-day sprint 10 years ago, researchers at @MIT helped chart the CFS path to commercializing fusion energy — even before CFS was actually founded. That sprint took place during the last day of service for Alcator C-Mod, a type of fusion machine called a tokamak. C-Mod is the progenitor of the SPARC demonstration machine we’re building today and the ARC power plant we’ve begun designing. And we’re putting the C-Mod lessons to good use. C-Mod showed that a compact tokamak employing very high magnetic fields is well suited not only for high fusion performance but also for economical power generation. And during that last day, researchers showed three separate paths to high performance in a competition to push the machine as far as it could go. It set a record that stands to this day, unmatched by any other tokamak. Unmatched until we start running SPARC, that is. The knowledge gained from C-Mod helps propel us to achieving net fusion energy, aka Q>1, with SPARC.

Fusion energy is often discussed as a matter of plasma physics, funding, and machine design, but bringing commercial fusion to the grid also requires a global industrial base that can manufacture critical components at scale. Today CFS took an important step toward meeting that need, announcing an agreement to purchase more than 10,000 km (3 GA-m) of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape from Fujikura Ltd. It’s the largest single purchase order for HTS tape, a critical component of our breakthrough magnets. This news is important evidence that our fusion industrial supply chain is taking shape. Our order allows Fujikura to invest in new manufacturing capacity for the long term, stepping up in our global network of more than 1,000 suppliers across 30 countries. We already built a supply chain for our SPARC fusion demonstration machine, but this agreement helps secure HTS tape for our next chapter: building ARC power plants, starting with our first at the Fall Line Fusion Power Station in Virginia. The ARC effort is moving ahead with design, technology development, and commercialization work like applying to connect that first ARC plant to the grid with PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. wholesale electricity market.

“Think about what [fusion] means in a technological race. Power is the thing that powers the next economy, right? All the geostrategic strife we have right now is about power in the form of natural resources. Who has them? What are they? What boats are they on through what body of water? Fusion takes all of that off the table.” That's CFS CEO and Co-founder @BobMumgaard speaking at the @heatmap_news House at #ClimateWeekNYC last week, discussing how commercializing #FusionEnergy will radically transform how we think about energy creation and consumption. The world today is heavily influenced by the acquisition, management, and consumption of finite resources like fossil fuels that we currently use to power the globe. Fusion offers an alternative — a near-unlimited source of energy that can be built anywhere to generate clean, safe, steady power.