Commonwealth Fusion Systems Moves to Secure Supply Chain for Commercial Fusion Plant

By Connor Hart

Commonwealth Fusion Systems will place a large order for the superconducting material required to build the magnets that are central to its planned commercial fusion power plant.

CFS said it will purchase more than 10,000 kilometers of high-temperature superconducting tape from Tokyo-based Fujikura, in what Chief Science Officer Brandon Sorbom called the largest single order of its kind.

Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed.

"We're actively placing orders and getting ready to execute our first ARC power plant," Sorbom said. "This collaboration underscores how the delivery of fusion power is becoming an industrial effort, not simply a scientific one."

Nuclear fusion--the process that fuels the stars--has yet to produce commercial energy. Companies around the world are working to develop fusion power plants, including CFS, which was spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Plasma Science and Fusion Center and has raised more than $4 billion to date.

High-temperature superconducting tape is an integral component of CFS's tokamak, a donut-shaped device that uses powerful magnetic fields to confine superheated plasma and create the conditions needed for fusion. The HTS tape is used to make superconducting magnets capable of generating those fields, Sorbom said.

HTS tape--which is roughly the thickness of a fingernail--can carry more than 200 amps of electrical current, roughly equivalent to that of a typical household circuit breaker, according to Sorbom. The material allows CFS to build magnets capable of generating magnetic fields of about 20 tesla, roughly 13 times the strength of a typical medical MRI, he added.

CFS is already using Fujikura's HTS tape in the magnets for SPARC, its experimental fusion machine currently under development. The company expects to begin commissioning the device next year, and then work as quickly as possible to reach scientific breakeven-when the fusion reactions produce more energy than is supplied directly to heat the plasma.

The device is intended to demonstrate CFS's fusion technology ahead of ARC, the company's planned first commercial power plant in Virginia, which CFS expects to connect to the grid in the early 2030s.

CFS is beginning to procure components for ARC while SPARC is still being tested. In addition to its deal to buy HTS tape from Fujikura, the company is in discussions with suppliers about other components of the commercial machine, Sorbom said.

"This is really sort of a start of really buying the pieces of the ARC power plant," he said.

Write to Connor Hart at connor.hart@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 30, 2026 00:15 ET (04:15 GMT)