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Nvidia, Google, and Bill Gates help Commonwealth Fusion Systems raise $863M

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Nvidia, Google, and Bill Gates help Commonwealth Fusion Systems raise $863M Tim De Chant PM PDT · August 28, 2025 Fusion power startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised $863 million from a long list of investors that includes Nvidia, Google, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and more.

“We’re continuing our trend here of looking into the world and saying, ‘How do we advance fusion as fast as possible?’” co-founder and CEO Bob Mumgaard told

The Massachusetts-based company has raised nearly $3 billion to date, the most of any fusion startup. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) previously raised a $1.8 billion round in 2021.

Fusion power has long been promised as a nearly limitless energy

Inside a fusion reaction, atoms are compressed and heated until they form a fourth state of matter known as plasma. When the plasma reaches the right temperature and pressure, those atoms begin to fuse, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process.

CFS is currently building a prototype reactor called Sparc in a Boston suburb. The company expects to turn that device on later next year and achieve scientific breakeven in 2027, a milestone in which the fusion reaction produces more energy than was required to ignite it.

Though Sparc isn’t designed to sell power to the grid, it’s still vital to CFS’s success.

Techcrunch event Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $600+ before prices rise. Tech and VC heavyweights join the Disrupt 2025 agenda Netflix, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital — just a few of the heavy hitters joining the Disrupt 2025 agenda. They’re here to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch Disrupt, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech — grab your ticket now and save up to $675 before prices rise. San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 REGISTER NOW “There are parts of the modeling and the physics that we don’t yet understand,” Saskia Mordijck, an associate professor of physics at the College of William and Mary, told TechCrunch. “It’s always an open question when you turn on a completely new device that it might go into plasma regimes we’ve never been into, that maybe we uncover things that we just did not expect.”

Assuming Sparc doesn’t reveal any major problems, CFS expects to begin construction on Arc, its commercial-scale power plant, in Virginia starting in 2027 or 2028.

The Sparc and Arc designs are both tokamaks, a type of fusion reactor that uses powerful superconducting magnets to confine and compress plasma. Tokamaks are well known among the research community.

“We know that this kind of idea should work,” Mordijck said. “The question is naturally, how will it perform?”

Investors appear to like what they’ve seen so far. The list of participants in the Series B2 round is lengthy. No single investor led the round, and a number of existing investors increased their stakes, said Ally Yost, CFS’s senior vice president of corporate development.

Existing investors that increased their stakes include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Emerson Collective, Eni, Future Ventures, Gates Frontier, Google, Hostplus, Khosla Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Safar Partners, Eric Schmidt, Starlight Ventures, and Tiger Global.

The new investors include Brevan Howard, Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global, Stanley Druckenmiller, FFA Private Bank in Dubai, Galaxy Interactive, Gigascale Capital, HOF Capital, Neva SGR, Nvidia’s NVentures, Planet First Partners, Woori Venture Partners US, and a consortium of 12 Japanese companies led

Such a broad base of investors may prove helpful as the company develops its supply chain and searches for partners to build its power plants and buy electricity from them. So far, the company has inked a deal with Google to buy 200 megawatts from Arc.

As the first of its kind, Arc is likely to cost more than subsequent power plants, Mordijck said.

And while Sparc will help prove the science is sound, it will do more than that for CFS, Mumgaard told TechCrunch. “That’s very important. But it’s also to know the capabilities that you need to be able to deliver it. It’s also to have the receipts, know what these things cost.”

The new round will help CFS make progress on Sparc, but it will not be enough to build Arc, which will likely cost several billion dollars, Mumgaard said. At this point, the company doesn’t know exactly what shape the funding for Arc will take.

“The fact that it’s a first of a kind technology is a wrinkle that then has a big impact on where the capital will come from,” he said. “We’re not entirely sure, but we are pretty committed to doing this. And our investors are pretty committed to doing this.”

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Tim De Chant Senior

Tim De Chant is a senior climate

De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 2018, during which time he studied climate technologies and explored new business models for journalism. He received his PhD in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA degree in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.

You can contact or verify outreach from Tim

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