Pacific Fusion
Nuclear Fusion
Pacific Fusion is taking the inertial route to fusion rather than the magnetic one: instead of holding plasma in a magnetic bottle, it crushes a small capsule of deuterium-tritium fuel with an enormous, extremely fast electrical pulse. The company's distinguishing technology is the impedance-matched Marx generator, a pulser architecture that is simpler and cheaper than the systems used at national laboratories, and its plan is to gang 156 production-scale pulser modules into a Demonstration System designed to reach net facility gain - more fusion energy out than the total energy stored in the machine - by 2030. Founded in 2023 by Eric Lander, Keith LeChien, Will Regan, Carrie von Muench and Leland Ellison, it launched publicly in October 2024 with a roughly $900M Series A led by General Catalyst that is released in tranches against technical milestones; the round has since passed $1B as those milestones cleared. In June 2026 a scaled module prototype delivered more than 440 gigawatts at about 1.1 megavolts in an 80-nanosecond pulse, and in July 2026 the Sirius prototype at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory passed 3,000 full-power shots at 95% energy efficiency. Pacific Fusion broke ground on its $1B research and manufacturing campus at Mesa del Sol in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on August 25, 2026 - the National Nuclear Security Administration signed a fusion-research MOU with the company the same day - and Nature reporters visiting the nearby Los Lunas build center that month found two of the more than 150 full-scale pulser modules the Demonstration System needs already completed. The machine is designed to produce more than 100 megajoules of fusion output per pulse, about 10 times NIF's record output.
