Blue Origin's $10bn round meets a nuclear startup and a fusion pilot

Blue Origin's first outside funding round is "oversubscribed" and has not closed, CEO Dave Limp said on Tuesday at the Trump administration's "Hello, America" tech summit in Washington, D.C., according to CNBC. Jeff Bezos has funded the company entirely since he founded it in 2000.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported the company had already raised $10 billion at a $140 billion valuation. Bezos put in $2 billion of that, according to the WSJ, and has invested $30 billion since the company's founding. Limp did not confirm the final numbers or how much Bezos has invested.

"I'm so amazed the investor community embraces space this much," Limp said at the summit, per CNBC. "They know that space is kind of infinite and the possibilities of putting commercial things in space, and it is a testament to the tailwind of raising this round." The CEO added: "I'm of the firm belief this will be the best investment Jeff has ever made, and by the way, he has some good ones on his track record."

New Glenn's return is the near-term test

Limp also said the plan is still for New Glenn to return to flight before the end of this year. A catastrophic explosion on Blue Origin's Cape Canaveral launch pad in late May caused extensive damage. According to CNBC, 1,000 people are working on the pad, 500 on the day shift and 500 on the night shift, as the company works around the clock to meet that schedule.

The rocket's record so far is mixed. New Glenn reached orbit on its first flight early last year, landed its booster on the second mission last fall, and in April saw a third mission where the booster landed but the payload, an AST SpaceMobile satellite, was deployed in the wrong orbit and lost. The May explosion followed.

Blue Origin's satellite plans give investors a clearer view of where the company is headed. TeraWave, unveiled in January, is a communications satellite service aimed at enterprise, data center and government operations rather than consumer broadband, and would involve more than 5,400 satellites in low Earth orbit. Project Sunrise, disclosed in March, would deploy about 56,000 satellites capable of handling artificial intelligence computing from space.

Limp said the orbital data centers are intended for sun-synchronous orbit, where solar power is constant, and would launch on New Glenn. They would carry little communications capability and instead connect into TeraWave to return results to Earth, he said. The company is targeting a launch cadence that ramps from hundreds to thousands of missions per year. "Our mission at the company is to make an economy in space, get millions of people working and living in space," Limp said. "That's the 100-year vision, but it allows us to move heavy industry off the planet, turn this planet into a park."

Elsewhere, capital moves into world models and reactors

Blue Origin's round is not the largest capital event in the dossier. AMD and World Labs said on 29 September that AMD will acquire the world models company by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval, in a transaction valued at $8.2 billion, Ars Technica reported. Computer vision scientist Fei-Fei Li founded World Labs in 2024 with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall. The company raised $230 million, some of it from AMD.

The company's first publicly usable tool, Marble, generates small 3D spaces using Gaussian splats that can be exported as 3D assets for film production and game development. It has since introduced other models and tools, such as Atlas. One use case that has justified heavy investment, according to Ars Technica, is generating synthetic data for training robots, a field where Nvidia has a strong lead. AMD has produced its own AI models, including Micro-World, but has not produced a stack competing with Nvidia's Cosmos and related applications.

As part of the deal, Fei-Fei Li will become executive vice president and chief scientist at AMD, while Johnson and Mildenhall will continue leading the World Labs team as it joins AMD to form a frontier research organization, according to World Labs' announcement of the deal. AMD's own acquisition announcement focused on robotics. It said World Labs' expertise will give AMD deeper insight into how workloads are evolving and help shape its future technology roadmaps.

The transaction is small next to the figures reported around OpenAI, which is in talks to raise $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation, according to Bloomberg and TechCrunch. Reuters and Fortune reported that AI housing startup EliseAI was valued at $4 billion in a round led by a16z and Bessemer, while Indian startup news outlet indianstartupnews.com reported physical AI company SiMa.ai raised $150 million in a Series C at a $1.45 billion valuation. Those reports sit outside the dossier's full-text sources and are included only as context.

Nuclear and fusion draw public money and public land

Valar Atomics is planning what it calls "Project Beehive" on more than 9,500 acres of land held under the Bureau of Land Management near Price, Utah, according to documents reviewed exclusively by NPR. The facility would include data centers and some 456 small nuclear reactors, along with a facility to produce nuclear fuel and others for storing nuclear waste, according to a proposal from the company to federal regulators.

In aggregate, the reactors would produce around 9.6 gigawatts of power for the data centers and more thermal heat for other industrial applications. NPR noted that the entire state of Utah produces only around 4 gigawatts of electricity on average, though its peak capacity in summer can reach around 10 gigawatts. The project's timeline calls for nonnuclear construction to begin as soon as the end of this year, with the first reactors coming online sometime in 2028. Valar has also sought around 650 acres of state land as part of the same project, according to state records. The Salt Lake Tribune first reported on the state land use last week, but not the larger proposed use of federal lands.

The project has raised alarm among local activists. "It's concerning to see that the Trump administration, with the support of the state of Utah, is pushing this forward on significant acreage of public lands," said Neal Clark, wildlands director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, according to NPR. Lexi Tuddenham, executive director of the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah, told NPR that "the coalition of people who are concerned about these things completely transcends political lines" and that her primary goal at the moment is to raise awareness. The Bureau of Land Management's Utah office confirmed to NPR it had received an application from the company and said it is reviewing it for completeness. It added that the public will have meaningful opportunities to provide input through the National Environmental Policy Act process. Valar said in a statement that no construction begins before permits and approvals, and that its internal targets set the pace.

In Japan, Helical Fusion expects to begin preliminary power-on tests at its demonstration fusion reactor in 2027, the company said on Tuesday, according to The Asahi Shimbun. The company is developing Helix HARUKA, described as Japan's first integrated pilot reactor using the helical approach. Construction of the first spiral coil at the National Institute for Fusion Science site in Toki, central Japan, started early this year and is now largely complete, allowing the company to open the facility to the media.

Helical Fusion completed a performance test of a high-temperature superconducting coil in 2025, replicating the magnetic environment inside a fusion device and achieving stable current flow under superconducting conditions, which it said was a world first. If first-stage tests succeed, the company plans to install a second coil and other major components, including a liquid-metal wall blanket, before power-on tests of the completed integrated facility around 2030. It plans to follow HARUKA with HELIX KANATA, a larger reactor with a net power output of 50 MW, and to begin full-scale investment in the 2030s. CEO Takaya Taguchi told reporters the company aims to build a commercial power plant as early as the 2040s, but said cost, safety and construction speed remain hurdles. Japan's government has designated fusion energy as one of 17 strategic sectors and plans to invest 3.1 trillion yen ($19.7 billion) through public and private funding by the 2040 financial year, according to the Asahi report.

The through-line across these stories is not a single sector but a funding environment that now treats space, world models, nuclear fission and fusion as investable at scale, and in several cases with public land, public money or public regulators in the loop. Blue Origin's round is the newest datapoint and the least settled: oversubscribed, unclosed, and still without confirmed final numbers.