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Helion Energy, Inc.
Helion is building a fusion power plant that aims to generate electricity by smashing hydrogen fuel together at extreme speeds and temperatures.
Helion is a fusion energy company. Its big bet is that it can build a machine that creates electricity the same way the sun does — by fusing light atoms together — and do it cheaply enough to sell power to the grid. Most fusion projects are giant science experiments funded by governments. Helion is a private company trying to turn fusion into a commercial product, one power plant at a time.
The company's approach is unusual. Most fusion machines use magnetic fields to hold hot plasma in a donut shape and keep it burning. Helion instead fires two rings of plasma at each other at high speed, smashes them together in the middle, and compresses the merged blob with magnetic fields until fusion happens. It then wants to capture the energy directly as electricity, rather than using the heat to boil water and spin a turbine like a traditional power plant. The whole design is meant to be smaller and cheaper than the big government-funded fusion projects. Helion has attracted serious attention and money. Microsoft signed a power purchase agreement in 2023, agreeing to buy electricity from Helion's first plant starting in 2028 — a rare deal for a technology that has never produced commercial power. Helion has also raised funding from investors including Sam Altman-linked vehicles and others, and it is building its first machine, called Polaris, in Everett, Washington. The company has said it aims to demonstrate net electricity from fusion with Polaris before moving to a commercial plant.
The honest picture is that fusion is hard, and no company has ever sold fusion electricity at a profit. Helion's timelines are aggressive, and skeptics note that fusion has been "20 years away" for decades. But if the physics works and the economics hold, the prize is enormous: a power source with no carbon emissions and no long-lived radioactive waste. Helion's bet is that being fast and private gives it an edge over slower, bigger efforts.
Saved answer · last researched 10 Nov 2026