Racing Towards Fusion and AI

post by Jeffrey Heninger (jeffrey-heninger) · 2025-02-07T20:40:56.798Z · LW · GW · 4 comments

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  Racing Towards a New Technology Is a Collective Choice, Not an Inevitable Consequence of Incentives
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Racing Towards a New Technology Is a Collective Choice, Not an Inevitable Consequence of Incentives

 

Before I started thinking about AI policy, I was working in the trying-to-get-fusion industry.

There are some significant similarities between AI and fusion.

• Both are emerging technologies.
• Both have the potential to have significant effects on the global economy.
• Both are dominated by O(10) major actors, which include both private companies and governments.
• Both currently require a capital expenditure of O($1 billion) to make something impressive.
• Both of the leading companies are about the same size [LW · GW], adjusting for when the companies were founded.
• Both feel futuristic.

The incentive structures for the two industries feel similar.

However, the culture of these two industries feels very different. Fusion companies are not racing in the way that AI companies are. People who are trying to build a fusion power plant are trying to sell electricity to the grid as soon as possible, but they approach this endeavor with a cooperative attitude, rather than a competitive one.

This culture of collaboration has deep roots in the fusion community. After some surprisingly good results on the T-3 tokamak in Moscow, in 1969, Soviet scientists invited British scientists to come measure the temperature on the experiment themselves. From then on, fusion researchers refused to be part of the Cold War and collaborated extensively across the Iron Curtain. Even the height of tensions in the 1980s saw the seed of a flagship international fusion experiment: ITER. ITER is the largest scientific collaboration ever undertaken, with member states representing over half of the world’s population.^[1]

ITER is less of a flagship now than it once was, due to the rise of private companies with plausible paths to fusion.^[2]

I will divide private fusion companies into two categories: academic fusion companies and non-academic fusion companies. Academic fusion companies were founded by people who have extensive experience in academic or national lab fusion efforts, use designs that have been researched for decades,^[3] attend academic conferences, and publish their results following the norms of peer-reviewed science. Examples of academic fusion companies include Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS; their first experiment is called SPARC) and Type One Energy.^[4] Non-academic fusion companies were founded by people outside of the fusion community, use novel designs, may or may not attend academic plasma physics conferences, and announce their results following the norms of industries with trade secrets. I won’t name names here because I think most of them are unserious, and I don’t want to besmirch people who are trying to do cool things, even if I think they are not going to succeed. Helion is frustratingly on the boundary, and I’ll talk about them later. This post is mostly about academic fusion companies.

Academic fusion companies inherited the culture of the existing fusion community at universities and national labs. They cooperate more than they compete. The attitude is that everyone will be happy if anyone succeeds.

Most of my evidence comes from interacting with members of the community. For a bit more legible evidence, here are some quotes from a Fusion Industry Association panel:^[5]

• Francesca Ferrazza stated that fusion “needs to have a global effort” and that “competition and cooperation go together.”
• Thomas Forner: “I don’t think any single company [alone] will be able to solve fusion;” it “will take collaborative work.”
• Moritz von der Linden: We “cannot just bet on a horse, we need to bet on the race.”
• Dr. Mark Pleško underlined the importance of “cooperation between government and industry” to accelerate development.

We can also look at whether there is more substantial cooperation.

In 2018, there was a big discovery that caused a dramatic increase in the number of academic fusion companies: the development of high temperature superconducting 'tape'. While high temperature superconductors have been known for several decades, most of them were specks of brittle material on a special substrate. MIT materials scientists were able to create a high temperature superconductor on a metal backing that can be made large and robust enough to use in construction. At liquid nitrogen temperature, this allows for twice as strong of magnetic fields as were planned for ITER, which reduces the necessary volume (and cost) of a reactor by a factor of 8. This put first generation fusion reactors within reach of venture capital. The MIT group which first planned a fusion reactor using this high temperature superconductor is now a startup: Commonwealth Fusion Systems. I think they are the organization closest to building a fusion power plant.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has also made this material available to other fusion companies. Most of the academic fusion companies are planning to use this high temperature superconducting tape. CFS isn’t even the first company to use it in an experiment: that honor goes to the University of Wisconsin & Realta Fusion.^[6][7]  Unconfirmed rumor has it that CFS is selling this tape at or even below cost of production, in exchange for equity in other fusion startups. Even if CFS’s design for a fusion reactor fails (and I don’t think it will), they have made themselves a central part of the fusion supply chain.^[8] 

The most important new material for fusion reactors is not being closely guarded by its inventors. It is being made readily available for new competing companies to use.

This is not the only example of substantive collaboration. Simulations and diagnostic equipment are also extensively shared. Academic fusion companies, university groups, and national labs are mutually supporting.

Someone might expect that cooperative systems are unstable to defectors. If one organization receives all of the benefits of other companies’ cooperation, but does not share their discoveries, they could gain an advantage. The fusion industry does have one potentially serious competitor that is less involved in the cooperative system: Helion. It would be unfair to call Helion a defector – they are older than the academic fusion companies – but they do follow different norms.

I said above that Helion is sort of an academic fusion company. Their founders have a background in plasma propulsion for spacecraft, which is academic plasma physics, but not quite academic fusion.^[9] They are not using a design that has been researched for decades, but they have pursued a serious experimental program to catch up. Helion recently turned on their 7th generation experiment, Polaris. They do attend conferences, and sometimes publish peer-reviewed results, but less so for their last two experiments.^[10] Helion has been making big promises, and might actually fulfill some of them,^[11] but a lot of the academic fusion community is still skeptical. Helion is also more comfortable talking about "leading the race."^[12]

Helion’s distinct approach, both technically and socially, has not disrupted the cooperative nature of the academic fusion companies. Maybe this will change if Helion proves to be successful sooner than CFS. I doubt it. Partially because I am uncertain if Helion will be successful, but also because I expect academic fusion to be more effective at marshaling talent and (less confidently) capital over the long run. I expect that 50 years from now, barring any dramatic changes to society, the descendants of today’s academic fusion companies will be producing more electricity than the descendants of Helion.

When domestic competition is insufficient to justify racing, someone could also point towards China. China has been putting significant resources into fusion. One of the best current fusion experiments, EAST, opened in China in 2006. They are also pushing ahead with next generation experiments. Unfortunately, they are not as public with their plans as the other players, and it looks like their plans are changing. I tried to figure out what’s going on, but am still confused.^[13] I do not know if they cooperate with Western fusion startups, but China is definitely part of the international academic & governmental fusion community. They are part of ITER, and have extensive collaborations between scientists at EAST and other tokamaks around the world. The fusion community included the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, and it continues to include China today.

I have sometimes wondered if the cooperative nature of the fusion community has been the most effective strategy, especially since fusion progress has been constrained by scarcity of government research funding. Going to the moon is exciting, but beating the Russians to the moon gets the Budget Office’s attention.^[14] For an even more specific example, I wonder what would have happened if, in 2017, someone had tweeted at the president:

CHINA is winning the Race to Fusion, 
but WE CAN WIN with TRUMP TOKAMAK.

This moment has passed. The best way to support fusion today would probably not be for the US government to build a big new tokamak. The institutions of the fusion community have changed with the rise of the academic fusion companies, but the cooperative culture persists.

The AI community has very different social dynamics than the fusion community. I don’t want to go into too much detail here because this does not feel like my value add to this conversation – there are a lot of people here who are following the leading AI labs more closely than I am.

The leading AI labs openly talk about racing and beating their competitors. Companies do not share their key technologies, encouraging other people to make startups using their technology to try to achieve similar goals. Some large institutional actors are less explicit about racing and invest in multiple AI companies. These actors are also less likely to believe in the promise of future AI. Nvidia perhaps plays a similar role to CFS in being an essential part of other companies’ supply chain. However, Nvidia was founded as a chip company, not as a trying-to-get-AGI company that chose to make its chips available to its competitors. There is also the open source community, which feels like a separate culture even though the industry overlaps. When a major lab chooses to make their model open source, they do not do so because they want to give their competitors tools to make AGI. I do not have as good of a feel for the AI community as I do for the fusion community, but it is clear that the two cultures are very different.

I do not think that the reason for the difference is that the incentive structures are different. As I said at the beginning, the two industries have fairly similar structures. The benefits AI companies believe they will receive if they succeed are larger than the benefits fusion companies believe they will receive if they are successful – although both are substantial.^[15] CFS might be more dominant in its industry than OpenAI, but Helion claims they are ahead and ITER has an over 10 times larger budget. All industries are different, but I think that these are close enough to expect similar race dynamics if the industries were merely reflections of the underlying incentives.

I think that the difference is because the industries have made different collective choices. The fusion community has chosen to create a cooperative culture, while the AI community has chosen to create a competitive culture. To understand how this has happened, we could look at specific choices made by leaders of the community at key junctures. One example is the choice of the Culham Five to visit the T-3 tokamak in the Soviet Union, or of Lev Artsimovitch to invite them.^[16] Another example is the choice by the founders of Commonwealth Fusion Systems to make their high temperature superconducting tape available to others. These particular instances do not tell the entire story. They are heavily influenced by, and help create, expectations and norms that pervade the community. These expectations determine what leaders are more likely to do by default and what employees are more likely to demand. Breaking these expectations would lower their respect in the community, making it harder to attract talented new hires and collaborations.

On the other hand, if the community’s norms and expectations involve trying to win a race against your competitors, the behaviors of actors in the industry will be very different. This collective choice can be more powerful than institution design, as was dramatically demonstrated by the attempted ouster of Sam Altman from OpenAI. Once such a culture is created, it is difficult to change. Changing the culture involves the hard work of persuading a large number of people, and convincing leaders to take different actions.

People and companies will race when they collectively believe that they are in a race. This is not merely a consequence of the incentives facing the industry. Different industries with similar incentives can have different race dynamics if their people collectively choose to embrace different cultures.

1. ^{^}

   The member states of ITER are Europe (EU + UK + Switzerland), Russia, India, China, South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

2. ^{^}

   For a longer discussion of the new fusion companies, see my book review of The Future of Fusion Energy. It is a few years old now, but I still endorse the conclusions and most of the predictions.

3. ^{^}

   I have heard people who are not in plasma physics use this as an argument against academic fusion companies. If e.g. tokamaks have been researched for decades and have not proven successful, isn’t this evidence that tokamaks are not the correct approach? This is sort of true: existing tokamaks will not make a functioning power plant. You need significantly larger scale, either in size (ITER) or magnetic field (SPARC). Tokamaks at this scale have not been tested. We can more easily use what we’ve learned on smaller tokamaks if we pursue this strategy than if we pursue a completely new design.

4. ^{^}

   A more complete list is: 

   • CFS (US, tokamak)
   • Tokamak Energy (UK, spherical tokamak)
   • Type One Energy (US, stellarator)
   • Thea Energy (US, stellarator)
   • Renaissance Fusion (France, stellarator)
   • Proxima Fusion (Germany, stellarator)
   • Helical Fusion (Japan, stellarator)
   • Stellarex (US, stellarator)
   • Marvel Fusion (Germany, laser)
   • Focused Energy (US, laser)
   • Pacific Fusion (US, Z-pinch)
   • Realta Fusion (US, magnetic mirror)

   The number of these companies has doubled since I wrote my book review 2.5 years ago.

   General Atomics (US, tokamak) should maybe also be on the list, but they’re maintaining an existing experiment rather than trying to build a power plant.

5. ^{^}

   The global fusion industry in 2022: Report launch event in Brussels. Fusion Industry Association. (2022) https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/the-global-fusion-industry-in-2022-report-launch-event-in-brussels/.

6. ^{^}

   Realta Fusion is a spinoff of the University of Wisconsin’s plasma physics group. This experiment is substantially smaller than CFS’s first experiment, so they are still farther away from getting fusion.

7. ^{^}

   Commonwealth Fusion Systems Delivers Superconducting Magnets to University of Wisconsin's WHAM Project. Commonwealth Fusion Systems. (2024) https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/commonwealth-fusion-systems-delivers-hts-magnets-to-uw-wham-project.

8. ^{^}

   I asked someone from CFS at a conference what they would do if a stellarator company ends up working better than their tokamak. His response was: “We’d probably buy them.”

9. ^{^}

   Human subcultures are nested fractally. https://xkcd.com/1095/.

10. ^{^}

    Sorry David Kirtley, but tweeting an emoji of a lightbulb is not up to the standards of scientific publishing.

11. ^{^}

    Microsoft expects that a 50 MW fusion power plant will come online by 2028. Helion also promised that, in 2024, its seventh generation experiment would turn on (which it did) and “demonstrate the ability to produce electricity.” They haven’t said anything yet about the second part of that prediction.

    Helion announces world’s first fusion energy purchase agreement with Microsoft. Helion. (2023) https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-worlds-first-fusion-ppa-with-microsoft/.

12. ^{^}

    Helion Announces $425M Series F Investment to Scale Commercialized Fusion Power. Helion. (2025) https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-announces-425m-series-f-investment-to-scale-commercialized-fusion-power/.

    Note that this quote is from one their investors, rather than someone at the company itself. It is something that they choose to include in a press release.

13. ^{^}

    Here is what I have figured out about China’s fusion program:

    Starting around 2010, China began designing a large tokamak experiment called CFETR. It is intended to be a complement and successor to ITER, and should be finished sometime in the 2030s. 

    Toward the end of 2021, China noticed that Commonwealth Fusion Systems seemed to be making substantial progress, and announced a new smaller, higher field tokamak, named BEST, to be completed in 2027. It is not clear where they plan on getting their magnets from. I haven’t heard of any agreement with CFS. There is a Chinese startup, Energy Singularity, that is planning on building high temperature superconducting tokamaks, but their current magnets are an order of magnitude too weak. My guess is that China does not currently have a source of strong enough magnets to build BEST. 

    Also, there are satellite images of a big new laser fusion facility which they have not announced. This is probably mostly focused on nuclear stockpile management (like NIF), rather than working towards a power plant.

14. ^{^}

    This sentence is intentionally vague as to whether funding fusion (or the Space Race) at this scale would have been a good use of government resources. The point I am trying to make here is that we would have made progress faster with more money.

15. ^{^}

    The believed benefits are roughly: save the Earth from climate change (and make lots of money) vs. become ruler over a substantial portion of the observable universe (and make lots of money). The difference here might help explain why fusion attracts idealists and AI attracts megalomaniacs.

    I do not think this is a complete explanation. Neither of these potential futures is empirically established. Both are human-created narratives.

    Also, ‘Fusioneers are idealists and artificial intelligenciers are megalomaniacs’ is kind of my point.

16. ^{^}

    Robert Arnoux. Off to Russia with a thermometer. ITER. (2009) https://www.iter.org/node/20687/russia-thermometer.

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