Pacific Fusion has officially broken ground on a facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that it hopes will finally achieve the fusion industry's holy grail: generating as much energy as it consumes. Because honestly, what's the point of a power source that needs a power plant to run it?

"It's a huge step forward for commercial fusion power," said Carrie von Muench, co-founder and COO, with the kind of optimism only a person with a billion dollars in funding can muster. "To our knowledge, there's no such facility being constructed in the country." And by "the country," she means the United States, because China is apparently building similar things, and we can't have that.

The facility will test Pacific Fusion's particular brand of fusion wizardry: firing intense, tightly coordinated pulses of electricity to create a magnetic field around a fuel target the size of a pencil eraser, squeezing it until the atoms give up and fuse. The demo machine will manage a few "shots" per day, while a commercial plant will need to fire one per second. Easy, right?

The system relies on 156 pulser modules, each with 32 circular stages made of 10 bricks, and each brick has two capacitors and one switch. It's like a giant, extremely expensive game of Jenga. Earlier this year, a one-third-scale version released 440 gigawatts of peak power in 80 nanoseconds, which was apparently good enough to greenlight the real thing.

Pacific Fusion aims for net facility gain by 2030, with a commercial power plant in the mid-2030s. The commercial reactor will need to generate five times more energy than the demo, because power plants have extra stuff to run, like lights and coffee machines.

The new campus will also host national security experiments involving high-yield fusion, because why not combine energy research with a little defense work? Each pulse will generate about 100 megajoules, roughly 10 times the output of the aging National Ignition Facility. "This exists nowhere in the world," said CTO Keith LeChien. "China is building these types of facilities, and we intend to be the first to deliver them." Nothing like a little Cold War energy to spur innovation.

Founded in 2023, Pacific Fusion is a relative newcomer but among the best-funded, having raised over $1 billion in a milestone-based Series A. That capital lets them plan ahead without the pesky distraction of fundraising every few years. "I don't think it would have been possible to move at this speed if we hadn't designed the capital stack the way that we have," von Muench said. Translation: we've got money to burn, which is ironic for a fusion company.

Pacific Fusion faces stiff competition from similarly flush startups like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion Energy, Proxima Fusion, and Inertia Enterprises, all aiming to plug a fusion plant into the grid by the mid-2030s. May the best reactor win.