Tiger Global-backed nuclear fusion group secures $1.8bn in funding

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has secured nearly $2bn in funding from investors that include Tiger Global Management and Bill Gates, as the US nuclear energy group looks to develop the promising but extremely complex technology.

Tiger led the $1.8bn Series B funding round backed by about 30 investors. It marked the largest private investment to date in nuclear fusion, which CFS wants to commercialise and bring to the grid by the early 2030s.

“The world is ready to make big investments in commercial fusion as a key part of the global energy transition,” said CFS chief executive Bob Mumgaard.

Nuclear power generation today is based on fission, where atoms are split to produce electricity. Fusion, conversely, would push them together and could in theory provide a virtually inexhaustible supply of energy without CO2 emissions.

But, despite decades of research, scientists have not been able to create more energy than is needed to carry out the process.

The world is ready to make big investments in commercial fusion as a key part of the global energy transition

The technology has attracted renewed interest in recent years as the world scrambles to tackle climate change. Unlike fission, fusion can be run on cheap, easily available elements such as hydrogen. Its waste would remain radioactive for a far shorter period than the plutonium involved in fission, without the risk of meltdowns.

CFS’s technology involves using large magnets that operate at high temperatures to create the conditions necessary for fusion. It claims its process will enable the fastest path to commercial fusion.

Claudio Descalzi, chief executive of Italian energy supermajor Eni, CFS’s biggest shareholder, said the group’s research meant a “commercial fusion plant is soon going to be within reach”.

“From the very beginning, we have strongly believed that this technology could be a breakthrough on the path to producing net zero energy,” he said.

CFS declined to say what valuation the round gave the company. It said the funds raised would allow it to build and commission the world’s first net positive energy fusion machine, which it planned to complete by 2025.

The funding round comes after a series of public and private sector breakthroughs in the past six months that have generated a flurry of interest around the technology amid a wave of investment.

The $1.8bn raised by CFS equals the total level of declared private funding in nuclear fusion to date by 18 of the roughly 35 fusion companies around the world, according to the first study of the sector published last month by the UK Atomic Energy Authority and the newly formed Fusion Industry Association.

Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, CFS was spun out in 2011 from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, which was established with the help of the US Department of Energy in 1976 in response to the oil crisis and rising prices in 2011.

Other investors in the funding round included Google, Norwegian energy major Equinor and venture capital group Breakthrough Energy Ventures.