Helion gets $175 million to build fusion power semiconductors

Fusion startup Helion has secured $175 million in U.S. federal funding to design, build and manufacture high-efficiency semiconductors and power electronics for its reactors, the company said Thursday. About 5% to 10% of the electricity passing through today’s components is lost, and in a system as complex as Helion’s, those losses compound, cutting into overall output. “If we can cut that loss in half, that’s actually twice the power output of the fusion system,” co-founder and CEO David Kirtley told TechCrunch.

Helion aims to bring its first plant, Orion, online by 2028 to start supplying Microsoft with power, and the new funding will help build automated manufacturing and testing lines for the semiconductor modules that machine requires. Built in Washington State, the new line will be the country’s first to produce this semiconductor class, which is also used in manufacturing, wastewater treatment, medicine and defense — and which Kirtley said currently has no domestic manufacturer.

The three-year award comes from the Department of Commerce under the CHIPS Act, the Biden-era law aimed at boosting U.S. semiconductor research and manufacturing. Helion also announced a fresh $50 million private investment alongside the federal money, without naming the investor, bringing its total funding to more than $3.2 billion — making it the second-best-funded fusion startup. More than $100 million of the award will go to semiconductor and packaging R&D in Washington State, while about $80 million supports tooling and process work in Vermont with GlobalFoundries, and GlobalFoundries separately got over $80 million in federal money to scale up manufacturing of gallium-nitride chips, a semiconductor type widely used in power electronics, Kirtley told TechCrunch.

Helion’s approach harvests electricity directly from the fusion reaction instead of using it to boil water for a turbine: plasma heated to over 100 million degrees Celsius pushes against a magnetic field, and that energy is captured by magnets and capacitors — similar to how a hybrid car recovers energy when braking. Kirtley said the R&D won’t make it into Orion in time for its launch, since federal contracts take months to negotiate, but should improve the efficiency of Helion’s later plants.

Why it matters

Helion’s semiconductor push could decide whether commercial fusion reaches the efficiency it needs to beat today’s power grid on cost, and the new production line is a rare case of fusion economics building a domestic chip-manufacturing base.