Google inks its first fusion power deals with Commonwealth fusion systems

Fusion Power obtained another boost on Monday while Google announced that it would buy half of the production of the first commercial center of Commonwealth Fusion System.

Commonwealth merger systems (CFS) will send Google 200 megawatts of electricity from its Arc power station, which should be put online in the early 2030s. Meanwhile, Google sends a CFS check as part of a new unexpected financing cycle.

The new round will be “comparable” to the previous one, said the co-founder and CEO of CFS, Bob Mumgaard. The last CFS financing round, a B series in which Google participated and which brought in $ 1.8 billion, closed in 2021. The company lifted Most of all merger startups.

“This is a very strong demand signal,” said Mumgaard. “This investment allows us to make part of the R&D that will allow us to get into faster.”

CFS builds a demonstration reactor, known as Sparc, just outside Boston. This installation will be completed in 2026, according to Mumgaard. Arc, the company’s commercial center, will be Built near Richmond, Virginie.

The New Deal only marks the second time that a large company has agreed to buy electricity from a Fusion startup. The first was signed in 2023 when Microsoft agreed to buy the production of the first commercial center of Helion, which should be put online in 2028.

Like other hyperscalers, Google has traveled the globe for new sources of electricity. The AI ​​and the cloud services have triggered an increase in the construction of the data center, which leads to a new wave of electricity demand with it. A forecast expects this request for energy from the data center will double at the end of the decade.

“To feed all this, we know that we will have to make big bets in this next border of energy innovation,” said Michael Terrell, head of advanced energy at Google.

Google thinks of its energy investments in three time horizons, said Terrell. In the short term, the company prioritized the priority for solar, wind and batteries. A little further, he bet on geothermal and modular nuclear reactors, as evidenced by his investments in Fervo Energy geothermal startup And Kairos Power nuclear startup.

The fusion energy is a little further, and that “would certainly put this (investing CFS) in the long-term category,” he said.

Google bought 8 gigawatts of renewable energy in 2024, twice what it adopted in 2023. And although solar, wind and batteries have been the main additions to the Google portfolio in recent years, Terrell told Techcrunch that the company would need other electrical sources to allow its data centers to exploit 24/7.

“There is certainly a path with wind and solar and storage in the regions where the resource is very strong,” he said, citing places like the Midwest, which has coherent winds, and the Southwest, which mainly has a cloudless sky. But other places, such as the southeast of the United States and many counties in the Asia-Pacific region, could be too cloudy or their electrical networks too fragmented to operate traditional renewable energies.

To compensate for these shortcomings, an approach consists in overeating wind and solar energy, but it can be expensive quickly.

Technologies such as the merger “writes in fact the cost of carrying out strong carbon -free energy penetrations,” said Terrell. “If you have these clean and firm technologies – even if they are more expensive by megawatt -hour – if you fold them in a way in the wallet, this actually results in your overall portfolio costs.”

Mumgaard is convinced that CFS can provide energy to Google in less than a decade, and when this occurs, he thinks that the fusion demand will soar.

“It does not depend on geography or weather, does not depend on access to special materials. This is something that you can execute 24/7,” he said. “We expect the merger to have a very big gain, because once it is shown that you can do it and that you have a first power plant, you can make it evolve. You could build this worldwide.”