Trump Media's bizarre fusion play for TAE Technologies

Trump Media & Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, on Thursday announced a merger with TAE Technologies, Inc., a leader in fusion technology that’s backed by investors including Google, Chevron, and Goldman Sachs. The deal, valued at $6 billion, creates the first publicly traded fusion company.

It managed to surprise the market, a rarity during a Trump presidency whose political brand has been built on shock value. The media company’s unlikely entry into fusion is ostensibly a bid to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom and its skyrocketing power demands, which have pushed both investors and startups into a race for new sources of firm power. Fusion — which relies on a still unproven technology and has yet to be commercialized — could be transformative as a carbon-free, nearly limitless source of baseload power.

Devin Nunes, a Trump loyalist who left Congress to be CEO of Trump Media in 2022, said in a statement that fusion power will be “the most dramatic energy breakthrough” since nuclear energy in the 1950s and ensure the country’s AI supremacy, a major Trump priority. Since January, the administration has issued a flurry of executive orders aimed at beating China at the AI race, such as directing federal agencies to speed up permits for data center construction and preempting state laws regulating AI.

Despite the advances in fusion power in recent years, the technology is still unproven. A joke among skeptics is that fusion “is thirty years away, and will always be thirty years away”; many scientists predict the mid-2030s is the most realistic timeline for fusion power to enter the grid.

The goal of fusion is to harness the nuclear reactions that powers the sun to create clean, nearly limitless energy in power plants on Earth. Scientists have been working on this for decades, but historically the process uses more energy than it produces.

A breakthrough arrived in 2022, when the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory managed, for the first time, to break even on energy for fusion ignition. That program cost billions of dollars, and took decades to reach so-called “ignition.”

No company has taken things the necessary step further and managed to create a reaction that produces more energy than it consumes — a prerequisite to commercialized fusion. Many are trying, including TAE, Helion Energy (which has a power purchase agreement with Microsoft), and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

The latter is considered the richest fusion startup in the world, having raised over $2 billion to date. CFS in September signed a PPA with the Italian energy giant Eni for a planned fusion plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia. The agreement is worth more than $1 billion, though the specific financial terms weren’t being made public.

The details of Trump Media-TAE’s project were sparse as well. The combined company said it plans to site and start construction of the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant (50 megawatts) in 2026 — assuming it can secure approvals — and eventually scale up to 500 MW plants.