Pacific Fusion, a startup founded in 2023 with the mission to deliver affordable fusion energy, has broken ground on what it calls the Demonstration System — a facility designed to produce fusion bursts exceeding 100 megajoules, making it the first and only net facility gain fusion facility in the world.
The groundbreaking, which took place today in Albuquerque, New Mexico, marks a pivotal moment for the private fusion industry. The company has raised more than $1 billion in private capital and is building on a pulsed-power architecture co-invented by co-founder Keith LeChien and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Bill Stygar.
Pulsed power works by storing electricity briefly and releasing it in an enormous burst — like a lightning bolt — in about 100 nanoseconds. For fusion energy, that burst creates the extreme conditions needed to compress fuel and release energy. The core technology, called an impedance-matched Marx generator (IMG), recently surpassed 3,000 shots at LLNL's facilities, with each pulse delivering 60 gigawatts in a 100-nanosecond burst at 95% energy efficiency.
The company has since scaled the technology roughly 11 times, achieving approximately 440 gigawatts of peak output power — the highest-power, single-step pulsed-power driver ever demonstrated. A system roughly 40 times the size of the original prototype is now planned for the Demonstration System.
"China is moving aggressively to build the next generation of fusion infrastructure, pouring billions into new facilities," said LeChien. "The U.S. invented many of the breakthroughs that made this moment possible, but to win we have to build."
The facility aims to achieve net facility gain by 2030, a milestone that would demonstrate that fusion energy can produce more power than it consumes — a prerequisite for commercial viability.
