Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has invested heavily in Helion, a nuclear fusion startup that has raised eyebrows in the scientific community. The 12-year-old company recently secured a $425 million Series F funding round, valuing it at $5.4 billion. Helion’s ambitious timeline for commercializing nuclear fusion energy has attracted deep-pocketed investors but also raised concerns among nuclear experts.
The company believes it can achieve this milestone within three years, while other fusion companies have proposed decade-long timelines. “This funding will enable us to build capacitors, magnets, and semiconductors much faster than we have been able to before,” said Helion’s co-founder and CEO in a statement. However, scientists remain skeptical about Helion’s aggressive timeline.
“I even think ten years is very ambitious,” said Mordijck, a physics professor at The College of William & Mary. Helion has garnered significant attention due to Altman’s involvement.
Helion’s ambitious timeline questioned
In 2021, he invested $375 million in the company, his largest personal investment to date. The startup also unveiled a power purchase agreement with Microsoft, aiming to deliver electricity from a fusion plant by 2028. The latest funding round saw participation from repeat investors like Altman and Facebook co-founder Dustin Muskovitz, as well as new participants such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Altman’s Vision 2 Fund.
Despite the excitement surrounding Helion’s Polaris reactor, the company’s seventh-generation prototype, the scientific community has expressed skepticism. “They don’t share any information, they don’t publish, they don’t provide data, they don’t share scientific advances,” said Mordijck, adding that such secrecy “makes it really, really challenging for us to assess where they are in the development of their system.”
Investors have flocked to nuclear fusion’s potential to provide vast amounts of clean energy, with total funding for nuclear fusion companies reaching $7.1 billion as of last summer, $900 million of which was given in the past year. Scientists warn that there’s a thin line between stoking enthusiasm and managing expectations.
“There should be a lot of responsibility when you give a date,” said Mordijck. “I do worry that—and it’s not just Helion—when all these companies promise specific dates and these dates are not being met, then the public will become skeptical because they will feel that they’re being lied to.”
