TAE Technologies

Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Nuclear Fusion

Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building commercial fusion systems around high-temperature superconducting magnet technology developed with MIT. SPARC, its fusion-energy demonstration tokamak under construction in Devens, Massachusetts, reached ~80% completion by the end of July 2026: the first of 18 toroidal-field magnets was installed in January and the second 48-ton vacuum-vessel half arrived in May, with all 18 magnets targeted by end of summer 2026 ahead of first plasma and a Q>1 net-energy attempt in 2027. ARC, CFS' first commercial plant - officially named the Fall Line Fusion Power Station and sited on 100 acres in Chesterfield County, Virginia - became in April 2026 the first fusion project to file for grid interconnection with PJM, and on June 4, 2026 CFS published a five-paper ARC Physics Basis in the Journal of Plasma Physics projecting ~1.1 GW of fusion power and ~400 MW of net electricity. CFS has also begun monetizing its HTS magnet platform, signing a potentially multi-billion-dollar long-term magnet supply deal with Realta Fusion and launching a SPARC digital twin program with Nvidia and Siemens, and in July 2026 became the first international partner in the UK Atomic Energy Authority's £220M LIBRTI tritium-breeding program to tackle fusion's fuel-supply challenge. On July 30, 2026 CFS closed $1B more from pension and sovereign-wealth funds (bringing total capital to $4B) and named former Moderna CFO Lorence Kim - who led that company's 2018 IPO - as its new chief financial officer, a hire widely read as early positioning for a future CFS public listing.

Helion Energy

Nuclear Fusion

Helion Energy is building fusion generators aimed at producing commercial electricity from fusion. Its Polaris prototype began operating in late 2024 and in February 2026 became the first privately developed fusion machine to demonstrate measurable deuterium-tritium fusion at 150 million degrees Celsius, a temperature record that still stood as of August 2026. Helion is now advancing Orion in Malaga, Washington, where site work began in 2025 for the company's first commercial machine intended to deliver electricity from fusion to Microsoft; in June 2026 Washington State made Helion the first company in the world to secure the regulatory licenses needed to build and operate a fusion power plant, and construction has since moved to the fusion generator building. A smaller new 'Tiny Merge' testbed is being integrated at the Everett campus to iterate on plasma formation faster. On June 4, 2026 Helion closed a $465M Series G led by Thrive Capital at a $15.5B post-money valuation, lifting total funding to roughly $1.5B; OpenAI remains in unsigned, advanced talks to buy fusion power from Helion at gigawatt scale as of August 2026, a negotiation that prompted Sam Altman to step down as Helion board chair on March 23, 2026 to recuse himself, and that has since drawn Congressional inquiry and courtroom scrutiny over his personal stake in Helion.

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.

Proxima Fusion

Nuclear Fusion

Proxima Fusion is Europe's best-funded fusion company and the first research spin-off from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, founded in Munich in 2023 to commercialize the stellarator - a twisted magnetic bottle that is harder to build than a tokamak but runs continuously without needing to drive a current through the plasma. Its quasi-isodynamic design, Stellaris, was published in February 2025 as the first peer-reviewed, fully integrated stellarator power plant concept. In February 2026 Proxima signed a memorandum of understanding with RWE, the Free State of Bavaria and the Max Planck IPP to build Alpha, a roughly €2B net-energy demonstrator at Garching near Munich targeted to begin operating in 2031, followed by a commercial Stellaris plant at the decommissioned Gundremmingen nuclear site later in the 2030s; an Alpha Alliance of more than 30 European industrial companies including Siemens Energy, Framatome, Air Liquide and Thales was announced the day before. On July 7, 2026 the company raised €411M ($468M) at a €2.4B ($2.7B) valuation, led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures with RWE and Google as strategic investors, taking total funding past €650M and funding completion of its Stellarator Model Coil in 2027.

Tokamak Energy

Nuclear Fusion

Tokamak Energy is a UK fusion company spun out of the UK Atomic Energy Authority in 2009 that pairs two bets: the spherical tokamak, a squashed-sphere reactor shape that holds plasma more efficiently than a conventional doughnut, and high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets built in-house. Its ST40 machine reached 100 million degrees Celsius in 2022 and closed out its 2025 campaign with three records - 1 mega-amp of plasma current, its highest stored energy, and a fusion triple product up over 30% to about 8 x 10^18 m^-3 keV s - before entering a $52M upgrade co-funded with the U.S. Department of Energy and the UK's DESNZ that runs through most of 2026. On the magnet side, Demo4 became in November 2025 the first HTS magnet system to reproduce fusion-relevant fields at system level (11.8 tesla, 7 million ampere-turns), and in April 2026 Tokamak Energy was named Magnet Systems Partner for the UK government's STEP prototype power plant under a £70M contract running to March 2029. The company sells that magnet capability commercially through TE Magnetics, which acquired manufacturer Ridgway Machines in 2025 and has since diversified into non-fusion markets, including a 2025 contract with General Atomics to supply HTS magnets for a DARPA undersea-propulsion programme and an April 2026 study on using HTS to cut power-distribution losses in data centers. The company's roadmap runs ST40 to the ST80-HTS prototype at Culham and then to ST-E1, a pilot plant designed to put up to 200 MW of electricity on the grid in the early 2030s.

BYD

Batteries & Energy Storage

BYD (Build Your Dreams) is a Chinese high-tech manufacturer spanning automobiles, batteries, electronics, renewable energy, and rail transit. Its auto business is unusually vertically integrated, with in-house batteries, motors, power electronics, and automotive semiconductors underpinning a lineup that now ranges from low-cost EVs and plug-in hybrids to premium Denza and Yangwang vehicles. First-half 2026 revenue fell 7.13% YoY to ¥344.82B (~$50.9B) and net profit dropped 20.54% to ¥12.33B as China NEV weakness and foreign-exchange losses outweighed overseas growth; auto-related revenue was ¥275.34B (-8.98%) while gross margin rose to 18.85% from 18.01%. H1 NEV sales were 1,808,511 (-15.72%), with the Q2 decline narrowing to 3.24% after a 30% Q1 drop, and overseas shipments of about 792,000 (+67.8%) making up roughly 44% of H1 volume. August 2026 NEV wholesales reached 440,293 (+17.84% YoY), the highest month of 2026, with a record 189,466 overseas units (43.03% of volume) offsetting still-soft domestic sales. On August 28, 2026 BYD opened its 10,000th FLASH Charging station in Shenzhen, doubling the network in under five months across 325 cities and reaching halfway to its 20,000 year-end target, with 1.83 million users (nearly one-third non-BYD). BYD's Szeged plant in Hungary began trial production in January 2026, but EVP Stella Li said in June 2026 that full-scale series production has slipped to Q4 2026 as equipment is still being installed; the same month BYD put its planned €1B Turkey (Manisa) plant on hold after Ankara withdrew tax incentives, making Hungary its top European manufacturing priority.