At least one nuclear fusion company seems to be betting its commercial-scale ambitions on the energy demands of data centers.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the $2-billion startup backed by both Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, today announced its plan to build the world’s first commercial fusion plant — in the midst of Virginia’s data center boom.
The 400-megawatt facility is slated to come online in the early 2030s with the help of Dominion Energy. This effort, however, will require a huge amount of capital and is for now technologically uncertain — and as a result the plan for the plant is more a reflection of the state of load growth today than of the state of fusion.
The MIT spinoff evaluated hundreds of sites for its first commercial plant over the last two years, CCO Rick Needham told Latitude Media. Key criteria included physical space, proximity to the grid, transportation infrastructure, labor availability, and enthusiastic collaborators. And of course, he added, “economics of the site and current and future customer demand for clean firm power.”
The CFS project will be located in Chesterfield, south of Virginia’s capital of Richmond. The state is at the center of the nation’s rush to build more data centers, especially to power artificial intelligence. In 2023, data centers amounted to more than a quarter of the state’s total electricity consumption, or nearly 34 million megawatt-hours per year. And in 2024, load requests are only increasing.
Dominion Energy serves much of the state, including Data Center Alley south of Washington, D.C., and Richmond. The utility already has 53 different data center customers, and 50 gigawatts of load requests.
Unlike traditional fission plants, which are developed by regulated utilities, CFS will independently finance, build, own, and operate the fusion plant. Dominion isn’t financially invested in the project, but will provide development and technical expertise, as well as leasing rights for the proposed site, Needham explained.
“The process for [the plant] is more similar to how an independent power producer would finance and build a large solar wind, or gas power plant, which does not seek cost recovery from customers,” Needham said.
That said, the CFS fusion demonstration machine is not yet fully ready.The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory managed, for the first time, to break even on energy for fusion ignition in 2022. Since then, CFS has been one of many startups pushing that success a step further: creating reactions that produce more energy than they consume.
According to CFS, their machine should start producing energy sometime after 2026, “demonstrating for the first time a commercially relevant design that will produce more power than consumed.” That design, CFS and Dominion hope, will power the planned Virginia plant.
Offtakers for the plant are still to be announced.
A surge of interest in fusion
According to a recent report from the Clean Air Task Force, private investments in nuclear fusion now exceed $8 billion. And $7 billion of that has been raised in just the last four years as the fusion industry has swelled — from 10 companies in 2017 to over 40 working on the technology today.
The sector has made several scientific and technological breakthroughs in recent years that may reduce the costs of building an eventual commercial-scale plant, and also boost investment even further, CATF noted. Those breakthroughs include the development of high-temperature superconducting tapes, which make it possible to design more compact machines. Commonwealth in particular is using both those tapes and high performance computing to move up its development timeline.
When it comes to powering data centers in particular, fusion could be an ideal match: a safer operational profile might mean fewer regulatory requirements and more flexibility in siting. Safety concerns have been a particular issue for nuclear fission plants.
As CATF put it, data centers may be “natural off-takers of this firm, clean energy.”
CFS’ announcement comes at a time when everyone from major tech companies and utilities to the Biden administration are doubling down on nuclear energy. Today though, most of that interest is focused on nuclear fission, given that fusion has still never been demonstrated at commercial scale.
Dominion Energy itself is also working to “explore the development” of a small modular reactor project in coordination with Amazon. In Dominion’s territory, the utility is forecasting around 15 GW of data center load by 2040. Nearly all of that is contracted, the utility’s data center practice lead Stan Blackwell said in November at an event hosted by Power Grid International.
“There’s a recognition that nuclear has its place in our generation mix or the customer’s mix,” Blackwell said. “And we’re seeing a significant interest by our customer base in nuclear power.”
