Last week, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced the latest round of INFUSE public-private partnership awards, committing $6.1 million across 20 projects.
INFUSE, launched in 2019, provides cost-share funding for collaborations between private fusion ventures and national laboratories or universities. Grants typically range from $100K to $500K and target challenges in materials, diagnostics, and simulation—areas where industry cannot justify building in-house capabilities but where lab expertise is decisive.
While awards went to nearly every major U.S. fusion company, from CFS and Helion to Xcimer, Thea Energy stood out. The New Jersey-based stellarator startup secured three awards, more than any other private venture.
For DOE, the move signals a deliberate broadening of bets beyond the tokamak. For Thea, it represents validation of its technical roadmap and a pivotal step toward making stellarators commercially viable.
Why Thea’s Wins Matter
Thea Energy was founded in 2022 as a spin-out of PPPL and Princeton University. Its central innovation is engineering simplicity:
Planar HTS coils replace the intricate, twisted geometries that make stellarators difficult to manufacture.
Dynamic control software fine-tunes magnetic fields in operation, overcoming the rigidity of past designs.
This dual approach, combining simpler hardware with software-based control, preserves a key strength of stellarators: steady-state operation without disruptions.
Each of Thea’s INFUSE awards maps directly onto the company’s two-step plan: prove performance and manufacturability with Eos, its upcoming testbed, and then scale to Helios, a first-of-a-kind power plant.
HTS Magnet Testing (with PPPL): Stellarators live or die by coil geometry. By leveraging PPPL’s reel-to-reel inspection system, Thea will validate its simplified planar HTS coils under cryogenic and high-field conditions.
AI-Accelerated Plasma Modeling (with PPPL): Modeling stellarator plasmas is computationally expensive. Thea’s project uses machine learning to accelerate confinement predictions, shrinking the “design-compute-build” loop from months to days.
Beam-Driven Plasma Analysis (with Columbia University): Neutral beam heating is essential to sustain plasmas, but its stability implications in stellarators are less understood. Columbia will model interactions between beams and Thea’s configuration, informing operational control of Eos.
Together, these projects span three key areas of stellarator development: magnets, modeling, and plasma physics. Securing awards in each underscores the range of Thea’s current research activity.
Earlier this year, Thea Energy designed and tested a 3×3 array of HTS planar shaping coils.
A Federal Seal of Approval
Thea’s triple win is about more than just funding. INFUSE projects undergo competitive peer review led by Oak Ridge and PPPL. Most companies receive one award; even billion-dollar ventures like CFS and Helion secured just a single project.
By earning three, Thea demonstrated that its proposals align tightly with DOE priorities. And by contributing at least 20% of the budget itself, Thea signaled confidence in its financial footing and willingness to co-invest in de-risking milestones.
INFUSE, in effect, functions as a federal validation mechanism. For investors, policymakers, and potential partners, Thea’s selection is an implicit endorsement of its relevance and credibility.
Strategic Implications
1. Stellarators Enter the Mainstream
Thea’s triple win effectively elevates stellarators from “academic curiosity” to “serious commercial contender” in the DOE’s eyes. For decades, U.S. fusion funding has been dominated by tokamaks (ITER, SPARC) and, more recently, FRCs and inertial systems. INFUSE 2025 signals a deliberate broadening of that portfolio.
2. Diversification Across Approaches
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (pursuing a high-field tokamak) and Helion (a pulsed magneto-inertial approach) dominate headlines with billion-dollar raises. Thea, with modest capital but multiple DOE awards, has carved a differentiated lane. For investors, this represents meaningful diversification: a bet not just on who gets to net energy first, but on which architecture offers the most reliable, scalable path to commercial fusion.
3. Acceleration Through AI
The AI-accelerated plasma modeling project is particularly interesting. Simulation bottlenecks have historically slowed stellarator design. If Thea can leverage AI to reduce design times from months to days, it’d be well-positioned to iterate faster than the competition. This approach mirrors trends across other scientific disciplines, where machine learning is compressing discovery cycles.
4. Manufacturability as a Moat
The HTS magnet testing project points to Thea’s competitive moat: manufacturability. By validating coils on a reel-to-reel basis, Thea is proving it can produce magnets at scale and with quality assurance. In a sector where many designs remain bespoke or prohibitively expensive, that industrial scalability could be decisive.
Closing Thoughts
Over the next 12–24 months, Thea will look to use these INFUSE projects to materially de-risk Eos.
Key milestones would include:
HTS coil validation through PPPL testing.
AI confinement models delivering accurate, fast predictions.
Beam-plasma stability data from Columbia simulations.
If achieved, these efforts could improve Thea’s ability to raise capital and compete with better-funded rivals pursuing alternative approaches. With DOE support, academic partnerships, and a distinct technology path, Thea is already establishing itself as a credible stellarator-based approach in the American fusion portfolio.