Google inks its first fusion power deal with Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Fusion Power got another batch on Monday as Google announced that it would buy half of the first commercial power plant in Communious Fusion.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) will send Google 200 MW of Electricity from the Sagittarius Power Station, which is expected to take place in the early thirties. Meanwhile, Google sends CFS check as part of an unannounced new financing round.

Bob Momgard, founder and CEO of CFS, said the new round will be “comparable” to the previous round. The latest financing round from CFS, a B -series in which Google participated, which brought $ 1.8 billion, was closed in 2021. The company gathered more than any startup to integrate.

“This is a very strong request signal,” said Moujed. “This investment allows us to do some research and development that will enable us to enter into an arc faster.”

CFS builds a demonstration reactor, known as Sparc, outside Boston. This facility will be completed in 2026, according to Momsard. The ARC, the company’s commercial power plant, will be built near Richmond, Virginia.

The new deal only represents the second time that a major company has agreed to buy energy from an emerging company. The first was signed in 2023 when Microsoft agreed to purchase the output of the first commercial power plant, which is scheduled to come online in 2028.

Like other Easter, Google roams the world for new electricity sources. Cloud services and Cloud sparked an increase in the construction of the data center, which prompted a new wave of electricity demand with it. One of the expectations expects that the demand for data center can double by the end of the contract.

“To run all this, we know that we will need to make large bets on these next limits of energy innovation,” said Michael Terrell, president of Google Advanced Energy.

Terrell said that Google is considering its energy investments through three time prospects. In the short term, the company gave priority for solar energy, wind and batteries. A little further, it bets on the thermal and small thermal nuclear reactors, as it is clear from its investments in starting the thermal thermal energy and the start of nuclear operation.

The integration energy is a little more, and this “will definitely put this [CFS investment] In the long -term category.

Google 8 Gigawatts bought renewable energy in 2024, twice what it is in 2023. While solar energy, wind and batteries were the main additions to Google’s portfolio in recent years, Terrell Techcrunch told the company that will need other energy sources to allow data centers to work 24/7.

“There is definitely a road with wind, solar energy and storage in areas where the supplier is very strong,” he said while a west of the Middle West, which contains fixed winds, and the southwest, which often contains a cloud -free sky. But other places, such as the southeastern United States and many countries in the Asia and Pacific region may be very absent or very fragmented energy networks so that traditional renewable energy sources do not work.

To compensate for these shortcomings, one of the approaches is excessive building and solar energy, but this can become very expensive.

Terrell said technologies such as fusion “actually reduces the cost of achieving high carbon -free energy.” “If you have these clean technologies and companies-even if they are more expensive on the basis of every MB clock-if you fold these technologies in the wallet, they actually decrease your total costs.”

Mumgaard is sure that CFS can provide energy to Google in less than a decade, and when that happens, it is believed that the demand for fusion will rise.

“This does not depend on geography or weather, it does not depend on access to special materials. It is something you can run around the clock throughout the week,” he said. ))