Pacific Fusion breaks ground on net-gain demonstration facility
Pacific Fusion has broken ground on a demonstration facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico, designed to achieve net facility gain by 2030. The company defines that milestone as generating as much energy as the entire facility consumes, a threshold no fusion experiment or device has yet reached.
The site will test the startup’s pulsed-power approach to fusion and is also intended to host national security-related experiments involving high-yield fusion. Pacific Fusion, founded in 2023, is targeting a commercial power plant in the mid-2030s.
Aiming beyond fusion-target gain
The National Ignition Facility has demonstrated that controlled fusion reactions can produce more energy than they consume. That result concerns the reaction itself, however, and remains well below the output needed to offset the energy required to run a complete facility.
Pacific Fusion is pursuing the broader net-facility-gain measure. Its eventual commercial-scale reactor would need to generate about five times the energy of the demonstration system, partly because a power plant requires additional equipment.
Each pulse at the Albuquerque system is expected to generate on the order of 100 megajoules. Chief technical officer Keith LeChien said that would be roughly 10 times the output of the National Ignition Facility.
How the pulsed-power system works
Pacific Fusion plans to use intense, tightly coordinated electrical pulses to create a magnetic field around a fuel target approximately the size of a pencil eraser. The field squeezes the target until its fuel atoms fuse.
The pulses will come from 156 pulser modules. Each module contains 32 circular stages, with 10 bricks in every stage. A brick combines two capacitors, which store energy, with a switch that releases it.
Earlier in 2026, the company tested a one-third-scale pulser module that released 440 gigawatts of peak power in 80 nanoseconds. Pacific Fusion said those results were sufficient to approve construction of the demonstration facility.
From a handful of shots to power-plant cadence
The demonstration facility will be capable of firing only a handful of shots per day. A full-scale power plant, by contrast, would need to complete one shot every second, making repetition rate a major distinction between the proposed facility and commercial operation.
Pacific Fusion has raised more than $1 billion in a milestone-based Series A round. Co-founder and chief operating officer Carrie von Muench said the gated funding structure allowed the company to plan further ahead without returning to fundraising every few years.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion Energy, Proxima Fusion and Inertia Enterprises are also pursuing grid-connected fusion plants in the mid-2030s or sooner. For businesses assessing long-term electricity options, Pacific Fusion’s construction milestone is significant, but net facility gain and reliable shot frequency remain the practical tests separating a demonstration system from a power plant.