聚变公司获重大资金支持，融资总额达40亿美元

Bob, I'm going to put that physics question to you. In the beginning, conventional nuclear energy, which thanks to well, Wade, I was reminded this vision non-conventional like you're working on is fusion. Explain the difference in, you know, laypersons terms. Maybe we took physics 25 years ago. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, they differ by, you know, only a few letters there, but they're actually super, super different in the physics.

They're the, the opposite. So, um, in fission, nuclear power as it exists today, we split the atom, take the heavy ones uranium, and split them, cause a chain reaction, keeps splitting that and fuel rods. That's our reactors today. Um, infusion. It's actually the process that starts at the beginning of the Big Bang. It's in the stars, where we take the smallest atoms and we put them together. And in doing so, we release a lot of energy.

There's no chain reaction, there's no uranium, there's no plutonium. So it's the combining of the atoms. And they, you know, both release a large amount of energy without a lot of mass, which is why they're so interesting as energy sources. Um, but they have, you know, very, very different types of, uh, machines that you built to do them. So, Bob, we love the idea, but it's it's really hard to do. It's it's never been done outside of lab.

How do we know that you can actually do this? Yeah. So we realized how the stars worked. You know, about 100 years ago, which seems like a long time ago, but in terms of understanding, you know, basic physical processes that are inside, uh, many of the things we do every day. That's not that long ago. And over the what the in particular the last 30 years, we really figured out the right conditions needed for this reaction to occur.

Um, and it's really hot. It's it's really dense. It's it has to be inside specially built machines. But we've built now a bunch of them and of the type of machine that we build at CFS, we built about 150 of them and they've gotten better and better and better every iteration. And the science of how these work, we've studied at national labs and universities, and that's gotten more and more precise in just about three years ago.

We had the first time on Earth where humans actually created the conditions where more power came from. The reaction than it took to started out as a big laser in California called NIF. So we've now had that proof of principle, but really in a way that you make a power plant. But the right physical reaction on top of this march forward in the science and and so that gives people confidence, including, you know, us and our investors, but we still are doing the science and publishing the results.

And and we're really looking forward to the machine that's being built where I am here in Davos, Massachusetts. Um, that is taking and building on the next step of this, which is to build a machine that can make this reaction go at very vigorous amounts of energy at an industrial scale. Bob, you've raised about $4 billion, including $1 billion recently. Where's all this money actually going and how much more of it do you think that you need before you're producing power?

So you know that the the 4 billion that we've raised and that comes from a wide set of investors that range from, uh, venture capitalists and, and high net worth individuals to start and moving up the chain into energy companies. Who are investors in US, Google, industrials and now uh, infrastructure investors and uh, and pension funds. So it's going to up the, the chain as the risk is going down because we're building things.

So that money has been spent to um, not all of it, but um, has been spent to build a technology of very high field magnets that really open up the ability to make this reaction more, more commercially relevant, more compact. It's also gone into, uh, building, uh, the demonstration facility I mentioned, which is called spark. And that facility is largely complete now. And this additional money we raised just recently that is now setting up to, to start to build, um, the first commercial plant.

So sparks that demonstrator. Now we're thinking about designing, prototyping, siting. The first plant is intended to produce commercial amounts of electricity. This raised today is not enough to actually go build that plant, but enough to get started on the design. Some of the prep work work to raise more to go build it. Um, you know, that'll be a couple more billion dollars, depending on exactly how we slice it. And, um, uh, different parties around the table, but it puts us in the right regime where we can now start to see what that first fusion power plant on the grid, um, could look like.

You know, what I find really interesting is the way you just described the the shift in your investors. And most recently, you said you're getting it from pension funds, notoriously risk averse money here. Money coming into something that, you know, it's still, you know, kind of untested and unproven. Do you think that says that there's more confidence that you guys are going to be able to make this happen? I do it's definitely tied to the fact that it's tangible.

You can show up at our facility at national labs and universities. You can see it. And then in our execution, you know, we've done a, uh, very, uh, deliberate set of milestones that you can see go. We've also been very transparent. We've we've peer reviewed, we've published, we've partnered with, uh, the Department of Energy, who has convened panels to look at the plans and provide their point of view. And we've done this in this sort of open way that gives people more and more confidence.

It's also having the same time that the need for energy is increasingly important and increasingly stark. As we look at what's going to power, I, we look at what's going to power, uh, electrification. And we see energy as a differentiator among nations. So the the draw on the market side is also there. In addition, the fusion industry as an industry is more established. There's more companies were the largest, but we're not the only.

So there's more to grab on here. At the same time, we have existence proofs now where investments in what were at the time somewhat, um, uh, you know, sort of areas that governments are played in alone. Well, these early path breakers, like SpaceX going from government, uh, rockets to private rockets, that's been lucrative. That's been a good investment for long hold, uh, deep capital to put a piece of it into that. And you can see that in some of the pension funds exposure long term to the space and the IPO.