Pacific Fusion holds groundbreaking for $1 billion Albuquerque fusion campus

The campus at Mesa del Sol will house Pacific Fusion's demonstration system. Net facility gain means producing more energy than the facility consumes, a broader test than scientific breakeven, which compares fusion output with the energy delivered to the fuel. No device has passed that test, TechCrunch reported.

Pacific Fusion uses pulsed power, also called Z-pinch fusion. Heatmap reported that the system sends fast bursts of electric current through a fuel target about the size of a pencil eraser, creating a magnetic field that pinches and compresses the fuel until atoms fuse. The demonstration system is designed to fire a handful of shots per day; a full-size plant would need one shot per second, Keith LeChien, co-founder and chief technology officer, told TechCrunch.

Each pulse is meant to produce on the order of 100 megajoules, compared with NIF's record 8.6 megajoules, LeChien said. EnergyTech put that at close to 28 kilowatt-hours per pulse. The machine will use 156 pulser modules, each with 32 circular stages of 10 bricks, and each brick carrying two capacitors and a switch, TechCrunch reported.

Earlier this year, Pacific Fusion tested a one-third-scale module that released 440 gigawatts of peak power in 80 nanoseconds, TechCrunch reported. The result was good enough to greenlight the Albuquerque campus. The underlying architecture is an impedance-matched Marx generator, co-invented by LeChien and LLNL researcher Bill Stygar, which stacks waves instead of voltages. A four-stage prototype at Livermore called Sirius, designed and built at LLNL under a cooperative research and development agreement with Pacific Fusion, surpassed 3,000 shots, each delivering 60 gigawatts to a resistive load in a 100-nanosecond pulse with 95% energy efficiency, the company said.

NIF's target gain versus facility gain

The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory fired 2.08 megajoules into a fuel capsule on 7 April 2025 and got 8.6 megajoules back, a target gain above four, LLNL said. It was the lab's eighth ignition. NIF's accounting stops at the target. Its laser system is about 1% efficient, so the facility draws far more energy from the grid than the reaction delivers, Heatmap reported. LLNL first reached scientific breakeven in 2022 and has repeated it many times; no other reactor has replicated the result.

Pacific Fusion aims to deliver roughly two to three times more current than Sandia National Laboratories' Z machine, which inspired its design, Heatmap reported. Sandia's machine is a single custom research tool; Pacific Fusion plans to cut costs with 156 identical, mass-manufacturable modules that can be shipped, assembled and swapped for repairs.

Funding and national security work

Pacific Fusion was founded in 2023. Heatmap put its 2024 Series A at $1 billion, led by General Catalyst, and reported that Carrie von Muench, co-founder and chief operating officer, said it should cover the full cost of the demonstration facility. TechCrunch described the milestone-based round as over $1 billion and reported that von Muench said the structure removed the need to fundraise every few years.

Von Muench also told TechCrunch that, to the company's knowledge, no comparable facility is being built in the country. The campus will host national security high-yield fusion experiments alongside the power demonstration. LeChien said China is building similar facilities, and that Pacific Fusion intends to deliver first.

What happens next

Pacific Fusion targets net facility gain in 2030 and a commercial plant in the mid-2030s, TechCrunch reported. Its commercial reactor will need to generate about five times more energy than the demonstration system, partly to power the additional equipment a power plant requires.