Fusion Power got another boost Monday as Google announced that it will buy half the output of the first business power station of a community merger system.
Commonwealth fusion systems (CFS) will send Google 200 megawatts of electricity from its arc power station, which is expected to come online in the early 2030 years. Meanwhile, Google sends CFS check as part of a new, untouched financial circle.
The new round will be “comparable” to the previous, CFS co-founder and general manager Bob Mumgaard said. CFS’s most recent financial round, series B, which Google participated and that brought $ 1.8 billion, closed in 2021. The company rose the most of some fusion startup.
“That’s a very strong demand signal,” Mumgaard said. “This investment allows us to make some of the R&D that will allow us to go in ARC faster.”
CFS builds a demonstration reactor, called SPARC, just outside Boston. This facility will end in 2026, according to Mumgaard. Arch, the company’s business power station, will be Built near Richmond, Virginia.
The new agreement marks only the second time that a major company has agreed to buy power from fusion startup. The first was signed in 2023, when Microsoft agreed to buy the result of Helion’s first business power station, which is scheduled to come online in 2028.
Like other hypersychologists, Google was looking for the globe for new sources of electricity. AI and cloud services have switched growth in data center building, pushing a new wave of electrical demand along with it. One forecast is expected that the power requirement of a data center will double by the end of the decade.
“To be able to all this, we know we will need to make big bets on this next limit of energy innovation,” said Michael Terrell, Google’s high -level energy.
Google thinks of its energy investments through three time horizons, Terrell said. Soon, the company prioritized solar, wind and batteries. A little farther, it is betting on geothermal and small modular nuclear reactors, as evidenced by its investments in geothermal starting rail energy And Nuclear starting kairos -power.
Fusion energy is a little farther, and that “would definitely put this [CFS investment] For a long time, “he said.
Google purchased 8 gigawatts of renewable power in 2024, double what it cleaned in 2023. And while solar, windy, and batteries were the main additions to Google’s portfolio in recent years, Terrell told Techcrunch that the company will need other sources to allow its data centers to operate 24/7.
“There is definitely a road with wind and sun and storage in areas where the resource is very strong,” he said, citing places like the Midwest, which has consistent winds and the southwest, which has mostly cloudy skies. But other places, such as the southeastern United States and many counties in the Asia-Pacific region, could be too cloudy or their powerful grids too fragmented to perform traditional renewable functions.
To compensate for these gaps, one approach is to build wind and sun, but that can be expensive quickly.
Technologies such as Fusion “actually cause the cost of reaching high -passengers of carbon free energy,” Terrell said. “If you have these pure, firm technologies-even if they are more expensive on a Megavatt hour basis if you are inserting those into the portfolio, it actually reduces your general portfolio costs.”
Mumgaard trusts that CFS can deliver power to Google in less than a decade, and when that happens, he thinks that a melting demand will grow.
“It does not depend on geography or weather, does not depend on access to special materials. There is something you could run 24/7,” he said. “We expect Fusion to have a really great reward, because after it shows that you can do this and you have a first power station operating, you could scale it. You could build this around the world.”
