Watch out, world—Big Tech is making another move toward fusion power, and this time, it’s buying future power output.
Google has signed the first formal offtake agreement for fusion power in the US with Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
The expanded partnership is twofold:
- An investment in CFS as part of its ongoing Series B extension round, building on previous investments by Google.
- A 200 MW offtake agreement for CFS’ first ARC fusion plant, which will be built in Chesterfield County, VA.
The companies declined to share financial details on a press call, including the size of the investment and the cost per kilowatt-hour of power from the first ARC plant. The deal also gives Google the option to buy power from subsequent plants.
“We’re using this purchasing power that we have to send a demand signal to the market for fusion energy, and hopefully move CFS technology forward,” Michael Terrell, senior director for energy and climate at Google, said on the press call.
All of the above: Google knows it will need a ton of power to move forward on AI at the speed and scale it’s targeting. To meet that goal, it’s made investments in just about every form of clean energy—solar, wind, advanced nuclear fission, geothermal, battery storage, you name it. Per Terrell, the tech giant has signed 170+ PPAs covering 22 GW of clean power.
“Our goal at Google is to help as many people as possible benefit from the deployment of AI to grow the economy, to create jobs, to accelerate scientific advances,” Terrell said. “But to power all this, we know that we’re going to need to make big bets in this next frontier of energy innovation, and that means accelerating advanced energy solutions to drive more clean energy onto the grid now so that we can meet power demand within the next decade.”
Fusion is the last piece of the power puzzle. Google considers its investment in fusion a long-term bet. Bob Mumgaard, CEO of CFS, reiterated that its ARC commercial fusion plant could be on the grid by the early 2030s.
Powering ahead: CFS is assembling SPARC, the tokamak it expects to use to achieve commercial ignition for the first time, at its HQ in Devens, MA. The company expects SPARC will be completed next year and is aiming to achieve ignition in 2027.
Next comes ARC, the first commercial plant. CFS signed an agreement with power utility Dominion Energy Virginia to build the first ARC, a 400-MW commercial fusion plant, by the early 2030s and sell power to the grid. The Google partnership may speed up that timeline.
“This investment allows us to do some of the R&D that will enable us to go into ARC faster,” Mumgaard said. “So it’s hard to say exactly how much it accelerates it, but it definitely puts it in the category where now we can start to work more and more on ARC while we finish SPARC, instead of doing them very sequentially.”
Lead Reporter of Ignition
