Fusion startup Helion has been awarded $175 million in federal funding to research, develop, and manufacture advanced semiconductors and power electronics for its fusion power plants, the company announced on Thursday. Currently, those devices lose about 5% to 10% of the electricity that flows through them. While those losses seem small, they can compound themselves in a complex system like Helion’s.
Helion has been racing to complete its first power plant, Orion, in time to meet a 2028 deadline to provide Microsoft with electricity from the grid. Funding from the award will help Helion build automated semiconductor module, packaging, and testing capacity to supply the fusion machine that’s currently under construction. The new production line, to be built in Washington State, will be the first in the U.S. to make a class of semiconductor that is used not just in fusion power, but in manufacturing, wastewater treatment, medicine, and defense.
Alongside the federal funding, Helion also announced a fresh $50 million private investment, though it didn’t disclose the investor. In total, Helion has raised more than $3.2 billion, making it the second-best-funded fusion startup. More than $100 million will be set aside for semiconductor and advanced packaging R&D in Washington State, while approximately $80 million will support R&D efforts in Vermont for advanced semiconductor tooling, design, and process development with GlobalFoundries, Kirtley told TechCrunch.
Separately, GlobalFoundries has received more than $80 million from the federal government to advance the manufacturing of gallium-nitride semiconductors, a type that is widely used in power electronics. Kirtley acknowledged that the R&D funded by the award won’t make its way into Orion in time for the launch — federal contracts can take months to negotiate — but he said they promise to help improve the efficiency of subsequent Helion power plants, which would improve their competitiveness in cutthroat electricity markets. Semiconductor efficiency is key to Helion’s approach to fusion, which harvests electricity directly from the fusion reactions rather than using them to heat steam to spin a turbine.
The startup is developing a reactor known as a field-reversed configuration. Fusion fuel gets injected into both ends of an hourglass-like chamber, where it’s heated to form a plasma. The plasmas are then accelerated toward each other using magnetic fields.
When they collide, another magnetic field compresses the ball further, raising the temperature to over 100 million degrees C. At those temperatures and pressures, atoms in the fusion fuel start fusing, releasing energy in the process and pushing the plasma outward. This force pushes against the magnetic field, and that energy is captured by the magnets and capacitors and turned into electricity — think of how a hybrid car or EV recharges the battery by using electric motors to slow the vehicle.
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