In a high-stakes effort to power energy-hungry artificial intelligence data centers, Pacific Northwest nuclear startups Helion Energy and Zap Energy are accelerating efforts to commercialize fusion power amid growing community opposition and power grid constraints in 2024. Driven by tech giants’ urgent need for zero-emission electricity to meet aggressive climate targets, these Washington State companies are deploying bold strategies ranging from rapid-prototyping miniaturized reactors to merging fusion technology with traditional fission.
The Growing AI Energy Crisis
Surging AI workloads require unprecedented amounts of electrical power, sparking local moratoriums and community backlash against rapid data center expansion across North America. Tech industry leaders face severe obstacles maintaining net-zero carbon pledges while simultaneously scaling compute infrastructure.
Fusion energy—often described as harnessing a “star in a jar”—offers the prospect of virtually limitless, baseline clean power without long-lived radioactive waste. While researchers have chased this technical milestone for decades, massive private capital inflows are suddenly forcing the technology out of academic labs and into fast-paced commercial development.
Helion’s High-Speed Sprint to 2028
Everett, Washington-based Helion Energy has raised over $1.5 billion to reach what could be a historic milestone: operating the world’s first commercial fusion power plant. The company signed a binding agreement to sell 50 megawatts of fusion energy to Microsoft for a Central Washington data center by 2028.
Helion’s approach utilizes a 60-foot prototype called Polaris, which uses magnetic fields to launch and squeeze plasma blobs toward a central chamber at 1 million miles per hour. As the ions fuse at 200 million degrees Celsius, the expanding plasma generates electrical currents captured directly as power, bypassing conventional steam turbines.
To meet its strict 2028 deadline for its commercial Orion facility in Malaga, Washington, Helion recently took a strategic detour by building “Tiny Merge.” This testbed device, one-eighth the size of Polaris, allows engineers to conduct deeper investigations and iterate designs significantly faster.
Zap Energy’s Dual Fusion-Fission Play
Just minutes away in Everett, competitor Zap Energy is taking a different technological path while hedging its bets. Zap has raised $330 million and secured Department of Energy backing to pursue a physics phenomenon known as the Z-pinch, which uses electric currents to generate self-confining magnetic fields around plasma strands.
In a commercial first for the fusion sector, Zap announced it will simultaneously develop traditional nuclear fission as a near-term revenue stream. The company is deploying a 10-megawatt fission microreactor based on legacy Toshiba designs alongside its three experimental fusion devices.
The dual-core strategy relies on shared engineering capabilities, specifically liquid-metal systems. Zap uses liquid bismuth and lithium to absorb heat in its fusion concepts, a process closely mimicking the liquid-sodium cooling systems required for its fission microreactors.
A Global Clean Energy Race
Helion and Zap are part of a global cohort of more than 50 private companies pursuing fusion energy. Opponents in the sector include Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has raised nearly $3 billion to target the massive data center corridor in Virginia, alongside heavily funded, undisclosed state programs in China.
Despite capital momentum, scientific skepticism remains intense. Critics point out that cost-competitive fusion has never been demonstrated, and many physicists believe commercial viability is still decades away—far too late to solve the immediate power shortfalls facing AI expansion.
Laura Berzak Hopkins, deputy chief research officer at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, notes that the sector is making unprecedented strides despite lingering hurdles. Major scientific and technological obstacles remain, but new diagnostic capabilities and plasma understanding have brought the field to an exciting threshold.
What to Watch Next
The next 24 months will serve as a critical proving ground for private fusion as Helion advances construction on its 50-megawatt Orion facility in Malaga, Washington. Industry analysts will watch closely to see if Tiny Merge yields the diagnostic breakthroughs necessary to keep Helion on track for its 2028 power delivery mandate with Microsoft.
Concurrently, Zap Energy’s integration of liquid-metal-cooled fission microreactors will test whether hybrid nuclear business models can successfully secure near-term regulatory approvals and commercial revenues. The success of these Pacific Northwest ventures will determine whether advanced nuclear technologies can solve the tech industry’s soaring energy demands before grid capacity bottlenecks halt the AI boom.
