Nuclear fusion power at a commercial scale may still be unproven, but a combination of AI and digital twin technology are bringing exploitation of this potentially revolutionary clean energy source closer to fruition, according to one of the pioneers in the field.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), one of the largest private fusion firms, has announced collaborations with NVIDIA and Siemens to develop a digital twin of its SPARC demonstration fusion machine, which it says will use AI and data and project management tools to accelerate commercial fusion.
The digital twin will use data leveraged from Siemens industrial software to create, catalogue, and process machine designs and assemblies. These will then be used in CFS’ modelling and simulation workflows, including the layering of AI-enabled tools.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, along with the OpenUSD platform, will be used to integrate data with classical and AI-powered physics models to create the digital twin of SPARC.
CFS says this virtual replica of SPARC will provide a user-friendly way to run simulations, test hypotheses, and quickly compare experimental results from the machine to its simulations. The outcome should be a faster path towards making fusion energy a commercial reality, building on the promising progress we reported in 2025.
Bob Mumgaard, Co-Founder and CEO of CFS, said years of manual experimentation would be able to be compressed into just weeks of virtual optimization using the digital infrastructure developed by NVIDIA and Siemens.
“Through this collaboration, we’re demonstrating how AI and integrated digital engineering can accelerate progress from design to grid power. This will allow us to transform how we build and operate fusion machines in the race to commercial fusion,” he said.
CFS is just one of several companies in the US, China and other countries around the world seeking to commercialise fusion power. It is a task fraught with difficulties, but the prize on offer has encouraged high-profile investors like Google, Microsoft, Bill Gates and Mitsubishi to plough funding into the sector. Google signed a power offtake agreement with CFS in mid-2025.
If it works at scale, fusion power offers the potential of almost limitless clean energy using process that are generally regarded as much safer and less polluting than the fission technology used in existing nuclear power plants.
Nuclear fission produces energy by splitting heavy unstable atoms, producing radioactivity in the process. By contrast, fusion forces atoms together at high temperature, requiring only water or lithium as a fuel and producing inert, non-toxic helium gas as a by-product.
A star, such as the sun, creates its energy through fusion, heating up hydrogen atoms to very high temperatures to form an electrically-charged plasma, which allows them to combine into larger helium atoms – and emit energy in the process.
But, while the massive gravitational forces at work in a star can produce those conditions, it is a lot more challenging to do on earth, where extremely high pressure and temperature conditions need to be created, contained and maintained. It has been possible to create conditions for fusion for short periods of time, but creating structures capable of sustaining it long term has proved testing for engineers, who have been searching for way to commercialise fusion for years.
Rapid development
CFS and its competitors hope AI-driven technologies will help tip the scales in their favour, adding to existing momentum.
CFS announced this month that it had installed the first of 18 magnets required for its demonstration reactor on its campus in Devens, Massachusetts, which it aims to get operational in 2027. The magnets – each of which weight 24 tons – are needed to contain and control the plasma, which needs to be heated to 100 million degrees Celsius makes its particles energetic enough to fuse together and release the energy to be harnessed in electricity generation.
Another US firm, Helion Energy claims it is on track to build the world’s first commercial fusion power plant. The ambition is to build a relatively small-scale 50-megawatt facility, taking a different technological approach from others, that could start powering a Microsoft data centre in Washington state in 2027.
US president Donald Trump has been a strong supporter of fusion power, despite his resistance the development of other forms of clean energy. That enthusiasm is reflected in the surprise announcement in December, that his media group, which hosts the Truth Social platform, was merging with Google-backed fusion developer TAE Technologies in a deal valued at more than $6bn. The media group said the merged firm would start building a fusion power plant in 2026, though details remain scant and no site has been selected yet.
(Photo: CFS)
