TAE Technologies closes $250 million financing round, totals $1.2 Billion to date

TAE, headquartered in California, has raised $1.2 billion so far for fusion research, the same mechanism that fuels the sun. It believes that non-radioactive hydrogen boron is the best fusion fuel. TAE was created in 1998 with the goal of having a commercial-scale fusion reactor supplying electricity to the grid by the early 2030s.

TAE Technologies, a private firm that hopes to revolutionise power generation through nuclear fusion, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $250 million in additional capital from new investors.

Chevron, Google, Reimagined Ventures, Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, and TIFF Investment Management are among the most recent investors, as are a prominent U.S. West Coast-based mutual fund manager and a large U.S. pension fund. In accordance with the Series G-2 funding deal, Goldman Sachs served as the only financial advisor.

Google, owned by Alphabet, has collaborated with TAE since 2014, supplying the fusion firm with artificial intelligence and computer capacity. However, Google made its first cash investment in TAE on Tuesday.

Technological milestones

As the need to reduce carbon emissions grows, global interest in fusion is increasing. When the nuclei of two atoms are exposed to intense heat, they fuse into a new bigger atom, emitting massive quantities of energy in the process. The tremendous heat requires a lot of energy to start off, which is one of the obstacles to fusion. Another consideration is that heat must be cheaply controlled in a power plant.

TAE also revealed a technological milestone on Tuesday: it reached temperatures of more than 75 million degrees Celsius with its current fusion reactor unit, codenamed Norman, which is situated in Foothill Ranch, Calif., where the firm is headquartered.

The funds will be used to develop its next-generation fusion machine, Copernicus, which the company hopes to have finished by 2025 and will be placed nearby in Irvine, California. “The caliber and interest of our investors validates our significant technical progress and supports our goal to begin commercialization of fusion by the end of this decade. Global electricity demand is growing exponentially, and we have a moral obligation to do our utmost to develop a baseload power solution that is safe, carbon-free, and economically viable,” said Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE Technologies.