Just east of Malaga, Wash.—a farm town in apple country—the Columbia River runs between basalt bluffs past the Rock Island Dam, which has turned water into electricity for the Pacific Northwest since 1933. Now, on a flat stretch of land nearby, a very different kind of power project is taking shape.
Helion Energy, one of the world’s best-funded private fusion companies, is building what it calls Orion: a machine it says will become the world’s first fusion power plant, delivering 50 megawatts of electricity to Microsoft data centers by 2029. In a field long dominated by laboratory milestones and moving timelines, Helion, backed by the likes of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is the first fusion company to make a commercial promise, one that provides a useful lens on the new industry: well-funded, ambitious and entangled with artificial intelligence’s huge appetite for power.
“The pressure’s on for Helion and everyone else,” says David Kirtley, Helion’s CEO. He has a ready reply to the old joke about fusion always being 20 years away. “I say, ‘We’re 20 years late. We need to step up and build these [plants] and deploy them at scale.’”
Private money has flooded the field. Big tech companies are signing power deals with fusion firms years before any commercial machine has delivered electricity. AI is not the only reason for this rush, but it has sharpened the urgency. Data centers require staggering amounts of around-the-clock electricity; fusion start-ups are selling a path to firm, carbon-free power. “It’s a situation that’s certainly unlike any other energy technology,” says Troy Carter, director of the Fusion Energy Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory—and, he adds, “maybe unlike other technologies.”
But you can’t buy your way around the laws of physics. Even as the walls at the Orion site rise, big questions swirl over the company’s bold promises—including from one of Helion’s co-founders.
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