Canada’s General Fusion is building the first Magnetized Target Fusion reactor. Its demonstration reactor, LM26, is already up and running. Located in Richmond, British Columbia, General Fusion, back in May, was struggling to get new investment into its homegrown Canadian technology. One of the very few private fusion energy companies, General Fusion has succeeded in compressing plasma to a density close to what will be needed to make a commercial fusion reactor. On August 21, 2025, the company got over the funding hump with a capital infusion of US$22 million (CDN $30 million) that should keep the dream alive to be the first nuclear fusion reactor to market.
Raising private capital as a Canadian company competing against American and European rivals has challenges. General Fusion has found that out the hard way when, earlier this year, it had to reduce its workforce by 25% to conserve capital after not attracting new investors. The late August capital infusion has come largely from existing investors who have indicated they are prepared to see the company through to a successful commercial fusion reactor launch. To date, the total amount General Fusion has been able to raise from both private and government investors is US$366 million.
In contrast, a rival of General Fusion has attracted almost ten times that amount. Bill Gates, whose Breakthrough Energy Ventures investment fund has helped Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Massachusetts-based company, raise almost US$3 billion to date. Commonwealth is developing the ARC reactor, which uses high-temperature superconducting magnets developed with the help of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In its latest round this August, it raised US$863 million.
The race, however, isn’t limited to just General and Commonwealth.
Helion Energy is a Microsoft-backed company with more than US$1 billion in funding to date. Helion’s technology is called pulsed magneto-inertial fusion that uses magnetic fields to compress and heat plasma in rapid pulses. It has begun construction of its Orion commercial fusion reactor to go online by 2028, producing 50 Megawatts of electricity.
Proxima Fusion is Europe’s answer to America’s Commonwealth and Helion and to Canada’s General Fusion. The company is headquartered in Munich, Germany. Its reactor is a Quasi-Isodynamic Stellarator, a spinoff of research done at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute. A demonstration fusion project called Alpha is scheduled for completion by 2031, with the first commercial fusion power plant named Stellaris to come online by the mid-2030s. The project has attracted a €130 million (US$150 million) round of funding recently, putting the total to date at more than €185 million (US$200 million).
TAE Technologies is developing commercial fusion power using Beam-Driven Field-Reversed Fusion in what the company describes as more energy efficient, simpler and less costly than its competitors. The company’s latest investment round added US$125 million to the $1.2 billion already raised to date. Its demonstration unit, called Copernicus, is under construction with a goal to deliver net energy output by 2030. Its prototype power plant, Da Vinci, will be operational in the early 2030s.
Other commercial fusion competitors include:
Astral Systems, a United Kingdom-based company that has been working with the University of Bristol on Multi-State Fusion technology. The company was co-founded by Talmon Firestone, a Canadian who is located in Toronto, Ontario. So far, the company has raised £4.5 million, about US$5.5 million.
Clean Planet is a Tokyo-based company with a Quantum Hydrogen Energy fusion technology, a low-temperature fusion technology that uses nickel-copper nano materials saturated in hydrogen to generate heating at 815 °C (1,500 °F), much lower than traditional hot fusion that requires millions of degrees.. The company has raised US$12.95 million to date, primarily from Mitsubishi Corporation and the City of Tokyo.
Helical Fusion is another Tokyo-based company developing Helix KANATA, a Helical Stellarator or Heliotron. It resembles a stellarator. So far, the company has raised US$20 million from Japanese public and private investors, including Mitsubishi. The goal is to have an operational pilot plant in operation between 2030 and 2035.
Novatron is a Swedish company developing what it calls a Magnetic-Mirror Fusion Reactor. It has received €3 million in funding from the European Innovation Council, as well as additional startup capital from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and several venture capital companies. It hopes to have a scalable prototype and pilot plants by the early 2030s.
Realta Fusion is a Madison, Wisconsin company that also uses magnetic mirrors to confine plasmas in what the company describes as “fusion in a bottle.” The technology is modular and can be scaled from 50 to 500 Megawatts of power. So far, the company has raised US$36 million and intends to have its prototype reactor, Anvil, operating by 2028. A commercial reactor will follow by the mid-2030s.
The total amount of investment capital raised by global fusion wannabes in the 12 months up to this past July was US$2.64 billion. Although a significant increase over the previous 12 months, these investments are far below what the fusion energy industry needs to get to commercial fusion reactor deployment. That number is estimated to be as much as US$77 billion, with American companies gobbling up most of the money available.
What about China? The Chinese government has established a state-owned company with an initial capitalization of US$2.1 billion this year. Called the China Fusion Energy Company Limited, it has been tasked with developing fusion energy commercialization. The plans include several different designs, many borrowed from Europe and the U.S. Two projects of note are the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) and the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak (BEST). EAST has demonstrated 1,000 seconds plus of high-energy plasma confinement, a world record, while BEST plans to get a five-times energy gain yield from its experimental tokamak by 2027, outperforming current U.S. experimental project yields.
A number of private Chinese companies are pursuing commercial fusion projects. Two are Hanhai Fusion Energy and Xinghuo. The former recently achieved confined plasma ignition in its experimental tokamak, while the latter, building a fusion-fission hybrid reactor, has received almost US$2.76 billion in investment and aims to generate 100 Megawatts of electricity by 2030 from its reactor.
The aforementioned tokamaks originated back to the Soviet Union, where it was first developed in the late 1960s. It, along with stellarators, represents the two most likely designs to achieve commercial fusion.
Today, the best-known tokamak is ITER, the world’s largest magnetic fusion device. It’s a project supported by 33 different countries that was first conceived as a joint experiment in 1985. ITER has yet to produce more energy output than what is needed to create the 150 million °C required for sustained plasma confinement and a controlled and sustainable fusion reaction. The earliest forecast date to achieve this is 2035, with commercial reactors to follow by 2040.