Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

The Fusion Revolution: The Fuel of Unscarcity

Summary: On December 5, 2022, humanity crossed a threshold that had eluded scientists for seven decades: scientific ignition. By late 2025, this physics breakthrough had evolved into a $10+ billion commercial race. This article outlines the roadmap from the NIF breakthrough to the deployment of commercial fusion energy—the “Fuel” engine of the Unscarcity framework.

The Breakthrough Moment: When We Lit Our Own Star

At 1:03 AM on December 5, 2022, a team of sleep-deprived scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California achieved something that critics had called “always 30 years away” for… about 60 years: Scientific Breakeven.

Here’s what happened: 192 lasers—the world’s most powerful—delivered 2.05 megajoules of energy to a fuel pellet the size of a peppercorn. The fusion reaction released 3.15 megajoules back. For the first time in human history, we got more energy out of a fusion reaction than we put in.

The Gain (Q): 1.54 (54% surplus).

The Significance: The physics works. Everything else is engineering.

If you’re thinking “but 54% doesn’t sound like much”—you’re missing the point. The first transistor in 1947 was objectively worse than vacuum tubes. The first solar panels in 1954 converted light to electricity at about 6% efficiency. What matters is crossing the threshold. Once you’ve proven the physics, you’ve entered the domain of engineering improvement curves.

And those curves have been brutal.

By April 2025, NIF had achieved 8.6 megajoules of fusion output—nearly tripling the original breakthrough in under three years. The target gain hit 4.13. That’s 313% more energy out than in. This is the signature of the 100x Future: once a physical threshold is crossed, improvement becomes exponential, not linear.

The Commercial Race: From Labs to Contracts (2025 Status)

Here’s where things get interesting. The race has shifted from government laboratories to commercial deployment. By late 2025, over 50 private fusion companies had raised more than $10 billion in cumulative investment—a fivefold increase since 2021. The fusion industry raised $2.64 billion in private and public funding in the 12 months leading to July 2025 alone, and Q1 2025 put the industry on pace for $3+ billion by year’s end.

The timeline has shifted from “decades away” to “deployment imminent.” And the contracts are signed.

1. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) — The Google Bet

The Technology: High-temperature superconducting (HTS) tokamaks. Think of it as the “classic” approach to fusion, but with magnets so powerful they can shrink the entire reactor to a fraction of traditional designs.

The Milestone: In June 2025, Google signed a 200 MW Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with CFS for their first commercial reactor in Virginia. This wasn’t a press release. It was a legally binding contract for electricity from a fusion reactor that doesn’t exist yet.

Let that sink in. Google—whose lawyers probably have lawyers—signed a deal to buy power from a technology that hasn’t reached net energy. That’s not optimism. That’s due diligence pointing toward confidence.

Rick Needham, CFS’s Chief Commercial Officer, called it “the first true bilateral fusion PPA and the largest fusion deal in history—so far.”

Timeline:

• SPARC (their demonstration reactor) commences operations in 2026
• Net energy (Q>1) targeted for Q1 2027
• Commercial power to the grid via ARC reactor in the early 2030s

2. Helion Energy — Microsoft’s Bet

The Technology: Field-Reversed Configuration (FRC) with pulsed magnetic fusion. The technical innovation? Helion captures electricity directly from the fusion reaction, skipping the steam turbine entirely. It’s like going from combustion engines to electric motors—eliminating an entire layer of inefficiency.

The Milestone: Helion’s seventh-generation prototype, Polaris, became operational in late 2024 in their 27,000-square-foot facility in Everett, Washington. It took three years to build—remarkably fast by fusion standards. By mid-2025, Polaris was creating the largest FRC plasmas the company had ever achieved.

The Deal: Microsoft’s 2023 binding agreement to buy 50 MW by 2028 remains the most aggressive commercial timeline in the industry.

Status: In July 2025, Helion broke ground on Orion—their first commercial fusion power plant—in Chelan County, Washington. Not a prototype. Not a demonstration facility. A power plant designed to plug into the grid and deliver electricity to Microsoft.

In January 2025, Helion closed a $425 million Series F round, pushing their valuation to $5.245 billion. Investors included Sam Altman, Lightspeed, SoftBank, and Nucor—the steel company. (When a steel manufacturer bets on fusion, they’re not thinking about press releases. They’re thinking about energy costs.)

3. TAE Technologies — The Shortcut

The Technology: Field-Reversed Configuration (FRC) with neutral beams. TAE’s approach uses hydrogen-boron fuel, which produces almost no neutron radiation—making it potentially cleaner and safer than other fusion approaches.

The Breakthrough: In April 2025, TAE published results in Nature Communications that stunned the fusion community. They demonstrated the first-ever successful formation of stable plasma using only neutral beam injection—a goal fusion scientists had pursued for over three decades.

Why does this matter? Traditional FRC machines need intricate plasma formation sections with quartz tubes and supersonic collisions. TAE’s new approach creates, heats, and stabilizes plasma directly in the center of the machine. They essentially eliminated an entire generation of prototypes.

Timeline Acceleration: TAE originally planned for a sixth-generation machine (Copernicus) before their commercial reactor. After the April 2025 breakthrough, they announced they’re skipping it entirely and moving directly to Da Vinci—their first prototype power plant—targeted for the early 2030s.

In June 2025, TAE raised another $150 million from Google, Chevron, and other investors, bringing their total funding to over $1.3 billion.

The Unscarcity Implication: Why Fusion Changes Everything

So we’re building fancy power plants. Why does this matter for The Foundation and the Abundant Foundation?

Because fusion is the only energy source capable of powering a post-scarcity civilization. Not solar. Not wind. Not fission. Only fusion.

1. The Energy-Matter Conversion

Here’s a secret economists don’t like to talk about: the cost of any physical good is ultimately the cost of the energy required to manipulate atoms.

• Water scarcity is really energy scarcity. With cheap fusion, we can desalinate oceans at planetary scale. The water is there. We just can’t afford to filter it yet.

• Food scarcity is really energy scarcity. Vertical farming works beautifully—it just uses a lot of electricity. With fusion, we can grow food anywhere, anytime, decoupling agriculture from geography, weather, and seasons.

• Material scarcity is really energy scarcity. Recycling is expensive because breaking waste down to atomic components takes massive energy. With fusion, we can build true circular economies where nothing is ever “used up”—just temporarily borrowed and returned.

When energy becomes effectively free, the economics of everything change.

2. The Collapse of Marginal Cost

Solar and wind are cheap but intermittent. You can’t run a hospital on “mostly available” power. You can’t smelt aluminum when the sun sets.

Fusion provides baseload density—millions of times more energy per kilogram of fuel than coal. A coffee cup of fusion fuel contains as much energy as 10,000 barrels of oil. And the fuel? Deuterium from seawater and lithium. We have enough for billions of years.

The Result: Electricity becomes a utility like water or air. Flat-rate or free for basic needs. This is the precondition for The Foundation, where survival needs are met unconditionally.

3. Powering the Cognitive Revolution

Here’s the problem nobody talks about: The AI revolution is an energy revolution in disguise.

U.S. data centers consumed 183 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024—more than 4% of the country’s total electricity consumption, roughly equivalent to Pakistan’s annual demand. By 2030, global data center consumption is projected to hit 945 TWh—a doubling. In the United States alone, data centers will account for 8.6% of all electricity demand by 2035.

AI servers use up to 10 times the power of standard servers. And companies are deploying them at unprecedented scale. By 2028, more than half of data center electricity will go to AI alone—consuming as much power annually as 22% of all U.S. households.

The result? Electricity bills are already rising. In some markets, data centers could increase average residential bills by 8-25% by 2030.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: without fusion, we face a choice between AI progress and climate goals. We simply cannot power the cognitive revolution with fossil fuels without catastrophic consequences. And renewables alone can’t scale fast enough while maintaining reliability.

Fusion is the “Fuel” that runs the “Brain” without cooking the planet.

Timeline to Abundance (2026-2040)

Let’s be clear-eyed about what’s coming:

2026-2027 (Demonstration Phase)

• CFS SPARC achieves first plasma and demonstrates Q > 1
• Helion Polaris proves net electricity generation
• TAE continues advancing toward Da Vinci
• The skepticism evaporates as the physics is replicated commercially

2028-2030 (Early Commercial Phase)

• First electrons flow to Microsoft and Google data centers
• Costs are high—but the learning curve begins
• More PPAs signed as utilities recognize the inevitable
• NIF-style inertial fusion potentially reaches 30+ MJ yields with planned upgrades

2030-2035 (Scaling Phase)

• Factory production of compact fusion reactors begins
• Multiple competing designs reach commercial viability
• Costs plummet along typical energy technology learning curves
• First developing-world deployments begin

2040+ (The Abundant Era)

• Energy costs approach pure maintenance and distribution costs
• The “energy constraint” on human civilization is lifted
• Desalination, vertical farming, materials recycling become economically trivial
• The Foundation becomes physically possible

The Hard Truth About Timelines

Let’s address the elephant in the room: fusion has been “30 years away” since the 1950s. Why believe it’s different now?

Three reasons:

1. The physics is proven. NIF achieved ignition. Repeatedly. With improving yields. This isn’t theoretical anymore.

2. The money is real. $10+ billion from hard-nosed investors who don’t fund fantasies. Google and Microsoft signing binding PPAs—not donations, not grants, but contracts with penalties for non-delivery.

3. The alternative is unacceptable. The AI energy crisis isn’t hypothetical. The climate crisis isn’t hypothetical. The major players have done the math. They need fusion to work. That kind of institutional commitment changes everything.

Could timelines slip? Of course. Engineering is hard. Fusion is harder. But we’re not waiting for a physics miracle anymore. We’re waiting for engineering execution. And that’s a fundamentally different kind of problem—one humans are remarkably good at solving when motivated.

Conclusion: We’re Not Waiting for a Miracle

The story of fusion has been one of overpromising and underdelivering for seven decades. But something has changed. The physics is proven. The contracts are signed. The concrete is being poured.

Google, Microsoft, Chevron, and a constellation of sovereign funds and industrial giants have made multi-billion-dollar bets that fusion works. These aren’t dreamers. These are the most risk-averse, due-diligence-obsessed institutions on the planet. They’ve seen something in the numbers that convinced them.

We are not waiting for a miracle. We are waiting for the concrete to dry.

When the first commercial fusion plant comes online—probably in the early 2030s—the era of fossil scarcity ends. And the era of Unscarcity begins.

The Fuel is being built. The question is no longer if, but when.

References

• The 100x Future
• The Foundation
• The Foundation
• National Ignition Facility Results (LLNL)
• Commonwealth Fusion Systems / Google Partnership (June 2025)
• Helion Energy Progress Updates
• TAE Technologies Nature Communications Paper (April 2025)
• Fusion Industry Association Annual Report (2024-2025)
• IEA Energy and AI Report (2025)