A billion-dollar fusion experiment is taking shape in the New Mexico desert, where startup Pacific Fusion hopes to achieve something no fusion facility has yet managed: produce more fusion energy than the total energy stored in the machine.
Pacific Fusion broke ground in August on a $1 billion Research and Manufacturing Campus at Mesa del Sol in Albuquerque. The roughly 225,000-square-foot facility will house its Demonstration System, which the company says is designed to achieve “net facility gain” by 2030.
Related: what is fusion and why it’s so hard
Scientists at the National Ignition Facility in California made history in 2022 when a fusion reaction produced more energy than the laser energy delivered to its tiny fuel target. But powering the lasers and the rest of the facility required far more energy than the reaction produced. Pacific Fusion wants to push past that barrier and demonstrate a gain across the machine itself.
Instead of using giant lasers, Pacific Fusion plans to fire enormous pulses of electricity at tiny capsules of hydrogen fuel. More than 150 truck-sized pulser modules will work together, creating powerful magnetic fields that rapidly compress the fuel and produce fusion. The company says each module can deliver more than a terawatt of peak power in a pulse lasting about 100 nanoseconds.
If it works, it would be another important step toward the decades-old dream of producing electricity using the same basic reaction that powers the sun.
The project is expected to create more than 200 permanent jobs in New Mexico, along with hundreds of construction and supply-chain jobs.
But this isn’t only a clean-energy story: Pacific Fusion has also signed an agreement with the US National Nuclear Security Administration to collaborate on high-energy-density science and research related to America’s nuclear stockpile. The Demonstration System is expected to produce fusion bursts exceeding 100 megajoules, creating conditions useful for both fusion research and national-security experiments.
That dual purpose puts Pacific Fusion at an interesting intersection of climate technology and defence even though some environmentalists believe nuclear energy is an enemy to nature and humanity.
Money is now pouring into the energy sector. Fusion companies raised a record $4.48 billion worldwide in the year to July 2026, bringing reported investment since 2021 to more than $14 billion. That’s because the promise is enormous: abundant, carbon-free energy without burning fossil fuels that could power our jet packs, and EVs.
But to date fusion remains experimental, and turning a spectacular laboratory reaction into an economical power station operating day after day is an entirely different challenge. Pacific Fusion isn’t building that power station yet but it’s building the machine it hopes will prove one can eventually be built.
