Google has announced a partnership with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a private company spun from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The tech giant would buy 200 megawatts of clean fusion power from what CFS describes as the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant, known as ARC, based in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
ARC is expected to generate 400 megawatts of clean, zero-carbon power in the early 2030s, which is enough energy to power large industrial sites or roughly 150,000 homes, according to CFS. With this agreement, Google can also purchase power from additional ARC plants. Financial terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed.
“We’re excited to make this longer-term bet on a technology with transformative potential to meet the world’s energy demand, and support CFS in their effort to reach their scientific and engineering milestones needed to get there,” Michael Terrell, head of advanced energy at Google, said in a statement.
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In addition, Google is also investing a second round of money into CFS for the development of its demonstration tokamak — a donut-shaped machine that uses massive magnets and molten plasma to force two atoms to merge, thereby replicating the energy of the sun. CFS claims the tokamak can forever change where the world gets its power from, generating 10 million times more energy than coal or natural gas while producing no planet-warming pollution. Fuel for fusion is abundant, derived from a form of hydrogen found in seawater and tritium extracted from lithium. And unlike nuclear fission, there is no radioactive waste involved.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ CEO Bob Mumgaard called the agreement the “largest offtake agreement for fusion” and said Google’s funding investment would allow his company to take necessary research and development steps to work towards developing its commercial fusion plant in Virginia at the same time it finishes its demonstration plant in Massachusetts. “It’s hard to say exactly how much it accelerates it, but it definitely puts it in a category where now we can start to work more and more on ARC (the future Virginia plant) while we finish SPARC, instead of doing them very sequentially,” Mumgaard said.
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Fusion is especially appealing to big tech companies like Google, who are looking for new sources to power their data centers and AI. Google has also invested in geothermal energy and small nuclear reactor projects, which can also provide baseload power with no carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, Meta recently struck a 20-year deal with Constellation to power AI with nuclear energy. According to the deal, Meta would buy all power produced in Constellation’s plant in Clinton, Illinois, for a 20-year period beginning 2027. This is the first time a company signed up to buy all energy from a single nuclear plant, though Constellation had entered into a similar but a stripped-down agreement with Microsoft in 2024 to reopen a Pennsylvania plant.