Pacific Fusion breaks ground on facility aimed at key fusion power milestone
Pacific Fusion has started construction of a demonstration facility in New Mexico intended to achieve net facility gain by 2030, a threshold no fusion project has yet reached.
Fusion startup Pacific Fusion broke ground Tuesday on a new facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, designed to produce as much energy as it consumes overall — a target the industry calls net facility gain. Co-founder and COO Carrie von Muench called it a major step for commercial fusion power, noting that, as far as the company knows, no comparable facility is currently under construction in the United States.
Despite rapid progress across the fusion sector in recent years, no device has yet reached net facility gain, meaning none has generated more energy than the entire facility consumes. The National Ignition Facility has demonstrated that a fusion reaction itself can produce more energy than is delivered directly into it, but that is still well short of powering the whole site.
Pacific Fusion aims to reach net facility gain by 2030 and hopes to operate a commercial power plant by the mid-2030s. Its approach relies on tightly coordinated, intense electrical pulses that generate a magnetic field around a fuel target roughly the size of a pencil eraser, compressing it until the atoms fuse. The demonstration facility will only manage a handful of shots per day, while a full commercial plant would need to fire about once per second.
Earlier this year, the company tested a one-third-scale version of its pulser module, which released 440 gigawatts of peak power in just 80 nanoseconds — results strong enough to greenlight construction of the new facility. Beyond demonstrating net facility gain, the campus will also support national security-related fusion research, similar to work done at the aging National Ignition Facility.
Founded in 2023, Pacific Fusion is among the youngest but best-capitalized companies in the field, having raised more than $1 billion in its first funding round. It faces competition from other well-funded fusion startups, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion Energy, Proxima Fusion, and Inertia Enterprises, all racing to connect a fusion plant to the grid by the mid-2030s.
