On July 3, as a heat wave swept the region, New York State’s grid imported 52 gigawatt-hours of electricity from Canada—enough to meet about 9% of its total electricity demand that day.
Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens called the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE). It opened in May and is officially the longest underground transmission line in North America.
An underground power line might not sound all that exciting, but this could be a big deal for the state’s grid planning, and for emissions. It could provide up to 20% of New York City’s electricity demand, largely with abundant hydropower from Quebec.
One wrinkle: The line has been down for most of this month, and some experts are concerned about how drought will affect the power supply feeding it. Let’s look at how the CHPE transmission line could help shape the future of our grid, and what barriers it needs to overcome to make a difference.
Planning for the CHPE (which is charmingly pronounced “chippy”) started 15 years ago, with the permitting process formally beginning in March 2010. The vision was to build infrastructure to better connect Quebec and southern New York.
Over 99% of Quebec’s electricity comes from renewable sources; most demand is met with hydropower, though the province’s wind capacity is growing quickly. New York has some hydropower of its own, as well as nuclear and wind, but the state still relies on fossil fuels for most of its energy generation.
Transmission Developers, a company owned by the alternative asset management firm Blackstone, and Hydro-Québec, the province’s manager of generation and transmission, partnered to build CHPE. Construction began in late 2022 and wrapped up earlier this year. The total cost for the privately funded project turned out to be $6 billion.
The construction of this line was a feat. It’s made up of a bundle of two high-voltage direct-current power cables, each measuring roughly five inches across. Developers buried the bundle underground or underwater across the length of New York State. Much of the line was laid at the bottom of the Hudson River, requiring special boats that shot water jets deep into the sediment to create trenches for the cable.
Connecting grids together can help accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. The ability to move electricity to where it’s needed could also help limit the amount of new capacity we need to build. Research has shown that interconnection can help cut emissions and lower system costs.
But CHPE is off to a slow start and has seen two outages so far. The first, on July 1, was reportedly caused by a trip at a converter on the Canadian side of the border. The second outage began on July 4, and the power line is still down as of the morning of July 22.
Some experts say this isn’t unusual for a new infrastructure project. Other power lines have seen similar startup challenges, and the equipment hasn’t really been fully tested until it’s in operation, Normand Mousseau, a physics professor at Université de Montréal, told the Gazette.
Officials traced the issue to a damaged section of cable on the US side of the border, and the company that manufactured the line sent experts to investigate the cause, according to reporting from RTO Insider, a trade publication.
The damaged portion of the cable has been removed and replaced, says Lynn St-Laurent, a spokesperson for Hydro-Québec. “It is currently estimated that the remaining work, including necessary post-repair testing, will be completed by the weekend.”
Similar woes have afflicted the New England Clean Energy Connect line, which opened in January, stretching 145 miles from Quebec to Maine. That project has also seen outages, and very little additional energy has flowed into the Northeast.
The good news for New York is that the grid wasn’t relying on CHPE yet. “Our planning studies did not assume CHPE would be available this summer, and that was one reason the grid performed reliably during the heat wave earlier this month,” Kevin Lanahan, a spokesperson for the New York Independent System Operator, the state’s grid management company, said in a statement. “A core principle of reliability planning is not relying on any single project.”
The idea is that eventually, states and regions will be able to rely—at least in part—on these projects, so there is pressure to get them working smoothly: Building massive transmission lines is a major long-term investment. In future years, as the equipment gets stress-tested and utilities begin to feel more confident in the projects’ reliability, they could play a bigger role on the grid.
One thing to keep an eye on moving forward is the condition of Quebec’s hydropower fleet: The region has seen intense drought for the past three years, eating into the water reserves used to generate electricity. That could mean there won’t always be abundant hydropower to ship across the border—even if the transmission lines are able to carry it.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Microsoft is putting $60 million behind the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, a push to use artificial intelligence to speed up scientific research across the government’s 17 national labs.
The company’s investment is split into two pieces: $40 million in Azure cloud computing and AI credits over three years, and $20 million for engineering and deployment help to get DOE researchers actually using the tools, Microsoft said in a blog post Wednesday.
Microsoft is also launching a new internal group called SPARK — Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge — to serve as the single point of contact between the company and DOE on Genesis Mission work. It’s meant to combine Microsoft’s program management, engineering, security and research teams into one coordinated effort, instead of leaving individual labs to navigate Microsoft on their own.
President Trump created the Genesis Mission through an executive order in November 2025, directing DOE to build a unified computing and data platform — since named the American Science and Security Platform — that connects the national labs’ supercomputers, AI tools and scientific datasets.
The order likened the effort’s urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project, and the White House said it’s expanded into a whole-of-government initiative involving more than 15 federal agencies, backed by more than $5 billion in commitments.
Microsoft named four initial projects taking shape under the partnership, including work with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., to speed up the discovery of new energy storage materials — cutting analysis that used to take years down to weeks — and autonomous lab work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aimed at detecting biological threats earlier.
“We move faster together,” Chris Barry, president of Microsoft’s U.S. Public Sector business, wrote in the blog post announcing the commitment, framing the investment as both a “national security imperative” and economic opportunity for the U.S.
Microsoft isn’t the only Seattle-area cloud giant courting the Genesis Mission. Amazon Web Services was recognized by DOE as a Genesis Mission supporter in December, highlighting its work with Idaho National Laboratory on AI tools for nuclear reactor design, and the company launched its own Genesis Accelerator Initiative in February, offering up to $50 million in cloud credits for DOE-related research over three years.
Google also announced Wednesday that it was committing $40 million of AI tokens and cloud credits for researchers in support of the Genesis Mission.
Energy companies are raising money at IPO at their fastest pace this century, taking advantage of investors’ hunt for new ways to bet on the boom in power-intensive AI data centers.
Initial public offerings for energy firms raised $12.6 billion in the first half of this year, according to data firm Dealogic. That marks the highest half-year level since the peak of the dotcom bubble in late 1999 and the highest first-half figure on record. It is well above 2025’s full-year total of $4.3 billion.
The surge in fundraising comes as access to the vast amounts of energy needed to run data centers emerges as a bottleneck in a multi-trillion-dollar AI investment boom.
It feels as if it should be illegal to even think about heating appliances during the height of summer—seriously, these heat waves in New York have been brutal—but we need to talk about heat pumps.
The appliances use electricity for heating, they’re incredibly efficient, and they’re on the rise. (For what it’s worth, many heat pumps can also be run in reverse to cool buildings.) In the US, heat pump sales have doubled over the past 15 years, according to a new report. And they’re winning the heating race against fossil fuels, outpacing natural-gas furnaces by 32% during the first quarter of 2026.
These stats are especially striking at this moment, because a key tax credit for heat pumps just ended with the close of 2025. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the data. Why are heat pumps still so hot?
In case you need a quick refresher, heat pumps use electricity to essentially move heat from one spot to another. A refrigerant moves around a loop in the device, expanding and compressing, gathering and releasing heat at different points in the cycle. (For a more in-depth look at the thermodynamics, this explainer I wrote in 2023 still holds up.)
The result is an appliance that can be incredibly efficient. Once you pay for and install a heat pump, it’s generally significantly cheaper to run than a gas or oil furnace or other types of electric heating systems. And because they’re more efficient and don’t involve burning fossil fuels, heat pumps can be a major help in decarbonizing buildings.
One of the major hurdles to wider use of heat pumps is the appliances’ cost: They tend to be more expensive to buy and install than gas furnaces. For this reason, many governments offer incentives to encourage their adoption. In the US, people who installed heat pumps between 2023 and 2025 were eligible for up to $2,000 in tax credits.
Last year, though, the Trump administration slashed those tax credits, along with many of the other incentives that were part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Effective January 1, 2026, no more financial help for heat pumps.
I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending. Tax credits of up to $7,500 for new EVs ended on September 30, 2025. In the quarter leading up to that deadline, sales spiked as people rushed to take advantage of the incentive. Then they fell off a cliff. Things are starting to normalize now, but clearly the tax credit’s sunset had a major effect.
But as it turns out, heat pumps are an entirely different story. In the first few months of 2026, sales have actually gone up, as Lucas Davis, an energy economist and UC Berkeley professor, points out in a new analysis.
Heat pump shipments were flat from December to January and have seen a gradual rise since then, according to data from the Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, a trade group that represents about 90% of the US market. This increase from winter into spring follows a seasonal trend seen in previous years—and it’s actually a bit stronger in 2026.
This data isn’t what you’d expect to see if losing the tax credit were hurting demand. As Davis lays out in his post, it seems the credit wasn’t really convincing people to install heat pumps, or at least the case for doing so was sufficient without the added incentive.
“It appears that the U.S. market for heat pumps is strong enough that it does not depend on tax credits,” Davis writes.
In 2024, MIT Technology Review put heat pumps on our annual list of breakthrough technologies. “We’ve entered the era of the heat pump,” I wrote at the time.
While heat pump sales have been up and down over the last few years, the era is going strong. The appliances have outsold gas furnaces in the US for the last four years. It’s not just the US, either. Countries including China and Germany have seen strong movement to heat pumps in recent years.
There’s rarely a straight path to adoption for new technology, especially something that requires so many individual households to make a significant change. But it’s encouraging that a major decarbonization tool is going strong, even when roadblocks pop up.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
ERCOT Grid Rules Add A New Infrastructure Hurdle For Texas Bitcoin Miners is a useful reminder that crypto coverage is not only about token prices. Sometimes the more important story is the infrastructure, regulation, security, or product layer sitting underneath the market noise.
The immediate point is straightforward: eRCOT outlined new large-load interconnection rules for Texas power users. That gives readers something concrete to work with, rather than another vague sentiment update.
ERCOT outlined new large-load interconnection rules for Texas power users.
The changes affect industrial Bitcoin miners seeking major grid connections.
The story connects mining economics directly to energy infrastructure policy.
Why This Matters Now
The timing matters because ERCOT is already part of a wider conversation across the market. Traders want to know whether the development changes liquidity or risk. Builders want to know whether it changes what can be deployed. Compliance teams want to know whether it changes how platforms operate.
In that sense, the story is bigger than one headline. It sits inside the ongoing shift from speculative crypto cycles toward more practical questions: who can use these systems, how safe are they, and whether the underlying incentives actually work.
The best way to read it is with discipline. It is not a guarantee of immediate upside, and it should not be treated as one. But it does add a fresh data point to the way the market is thinking about Bitcoin Mining.
The Bitcoin Mining Angle
For Bitcoin Mining, the important part is the specific mechanism. If this is a security issue, the risk sits in dependencies and user protection. If it is a listing or product launch, the question is access and liquidity. If it is a governance or research proposal, the question is whether the idea can survive implementation.
That is where this update becomes useful. It is not just a label attached to a trend. It gives readers a way to understand what might actually change if the development gains traction.
Crypto has a habit of turning every announcement into a broad market claim. This one deserves a narrower read. The value is in seeing how it affects the users, developers, institutions, or traders closest to the issue.
The Risk Side
There is also a caution attached. Source material can confirm that a development exists, but it cannot prove that adoption will follow. A proposal still needs support. A product still needs users. A chart still needs confirmation. A compliance tool still needs integration.
That is why the responsible reading is not to oversell the story. The stronger takeaway is that this adds to a pattern. The crypto market is steadily becoming more professional, more technical, and more sensitive to real operational details.
Readers should also watch for follow-up signals. That could mean developer feedback, exchange support, regulatory response, wallet adoption, liquidity data, or simply whether market participants continue reacting after the first headline fades.
What Comes Next
The next stage will decide whether this remains a narrow update or becomes part of a larger market theme. In crypto, that difference matters. Plenty of stories look important for a few hours and then disappear. The ones that last usually show up again through usage, liquidity, enforcement, governance, or developer adoption.
For now, this gives the market another piece of information to weigh. It is specific enough to be useful, but still early enough that readers should keep the caveats in view.
That makes it worth covering without pretending it settles anything. The story is a signal, not a final verdict.
The control room for General Fusion’s Lawson Machine 26. (General Fusion Photo)
General Fusion’s stock is trading up after it became the first fusion energy company to go public on a major exchange, debuting Monday on Nasdaq.
The launch of GFUZ stock coincided with the release of the Fusion Industry Association’s annual report, which reflected that same investor enthusiasm: private funding for fusion companies totaled $4.5 billion over the past 12 months. One of the biggest rounds went to Helion Energy, a Seattle-area company that raised $465 million last month, bringing its total investment to $1.5 billion.
Soaring energy demand from AI data centers has helped drive interest in the sector as an ambitious slate of companies is building devices that create and contain plasma — a super-hot, fourth state of matter required for atom-smashing fusion to occur.
For decades, researchers have chased this clean energy source, aiming to replicate the reactions that power the sun, a churning ball of plasma. While significant progress has been made, big technical hurdles remain, and it’s uncertain when the goal will be reached.
But the promise of fusion is so enticing that the risks appear worth it for many investors.
“A commercial fusion industry is a world-changing industry, and the returns on investment will be massive,” said Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, in the foreword to the report.
The sector has landed more than $13.3 billion from venture capitalists over the past five years, according to the annual survey. After decades of government support via national labs and R&D grants, the private sector is now picking up the majority of the tab for fusion’s progress.
One of the important milestones in the pursuit of fusion is “scientific breakeven” — the point at which the output of a fusion reaction matches the energy input to a device’s plasma, without including the rest of the system’s power needs. Scientific breakeven was first hit by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2022, but has not been reached by a private venture.
To be financially viable, the fusion companies need to go further, capturing more energy from fusion than required to operate their whole system.
The new report includes profiles of 56 companies worldwide that are pursuing fusion, including four based in the Pacific Northwest: General Fusion, Helion, Zap Energy and Avalanche Energy, as well as Kyoto Fusioneering, which has an office in Seattle.
Here’s a closer look at the four companies based in this region:
Avalanche Energy, Seattle
Notable fact: Avalanche is unusual for its small-scale approach to fusion, and its plan to launch a pilot plant by 2030 is among the earlier targets in the race.
Year founded: 2018
Target uses: Electricity, space propulsion, marine propulsion, off-grid energy
Publicly shared total funding: $104.2 million
Target for scientific break even: 2029
Target for first pilot plant: 2030
General Fusion, Vancouver, B.C.
Notable fact: General Fusion has made multiple pivots in recent years in its path to commercialization and was the first to go public.
Year founded: 2002
Target uses: Electricity generation
Publicly shared total funding: about $500 million
Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed; aiming to produce fusion conditions by 2028
Target for first pilot plant: Approximately 2035
Helion, Everett, Wash.
Notable fact: Helion was the first to sign up a fusion customer when it inked a deal with Microsoft in 2023, and aims to be the first to reach commercialization.
Year founded: 2013
Target uses: Electricity generation
Publicly shared total funding: $1.5 billion
Target for scientific break even: Not disclosed
Target for first pilot plant: 2028
Zap Energy, Everett, Wash.
Notable fact: Zap recently announced it will also pursue nuclear fission energy, building small-scale reactors alongside its fusion work.
Seattle-area startups raised $2.7 billion in venture funding through the first half of 2026, across 163 deals, down about 40% from $4.5 billion in 210 deals during the same period a year ago.
The figures come from the recently released PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report for Q2 2026. The decline in capital reflects fewer deals across the board in the Seattle region, with much of the funding going to a handful of large rounds for energy, cybersecurity, and space startups.
Here is the region’s top 5 for the second quarter, as tracked in the report:
Gradial raised $65 million for its agentic enterprise software platform.
Against the AI grain: In Q2 2026 specifically, startups in the Seattle area closed 85 deals totaling $1.5 billion. That was down from 101 deals and $2.3 billion in the same quarter a year ago, but up from Q1 2026, which PitchBook revised to 78 deals and $1.2 billion as part of its regular data updates.
Heavy infrastructure investments by Microsoft and Amazon have helped to establish the Seattle area as an AI hub, but the region’s pure-play AI startups, on the whole, aren’t seeing investment on the same scale as some of their peers in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs around the country.
That creates a disconnect with the larger U.S. venture capital market. AI companies accounted for 86% of all U.S. venture dollars in the first half of the year, according to the PitchBook-NVCA data.
Nationally, it was a record half: U.S. startups raised $412.7 billion through June, already surpassing the full-year record of $358.6 billion set in 2021. But the number is misleading. Deals of $100 million or more accounted for 87.5% of the total, and AI companies captured 86 cents of every venture dollar.
OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbed roughly 43% of all global venture capital in the first half of the year, by one estimate. The Bay Area, home to both, pulled in $319 billion, about three times its H1 2025 total.
Strip out those two companies and the national picture looks very different. Seed funding fell 27% nationally in the first half, and first-time fund formation is on pace for its lowest year since 2016.
Regional trends: In that way, what’s happening in the Seattle area reflects the current realities of the market. However, the region is also slipping relative to its peers in the latest numbers.
Among the 10 largest U.S. metro areas for venture funding, Seattle ranked seventh by capital invested in the first half of the year, down from fifth in H1 2025. By deal count, the region was last in the top 10.
The data used in this analysis covers the Seattle-Tacoma combined statistical area (CSA), a broader regional boundary that includes communities beyond the core metro region.
Political climate: Washington’s shifting tax and economic landscape adds another variable.
The state now taxes capital gains at up to 9.9%, a new millionaires’ tax takes effect in 2028, and legislators this year floated taxing the federal QSBS exemption that startup founders and early employees rely on when they sell shares at exit. That bill didn’t pass, but generated enough alarm to cause a backlash from startup community leaders and investors.
Looking ahead: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ Kent-based space company, is reportedly seeking up to $10 billion in what would be its first outside funding round. A deal that size would be larger than every other Seattle-area venture round this year combined.
General Fusion’s Lawson Machine 26, its fusion demo device. (General Fusion Photo)
British Columbia-based General Fusion on Friday completed its deal to become first publicly traded fusion stock on a major exchange. The 24-year-old company is trying to harness the atom-smashing reactions that power the sun, aiming to create commercially viable amounts of electricity — a feat no one has yet accomplished.
General Fusion closed its merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III, allowing it to go public through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The companies first announced the $1 billion agreement in January, months after layoffs and a public plea by its CEO for new investment.
Its shares are expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq exchange Monday under the ticker symbol GFUZ, and its warrants under GFUZW.
Last month, the company announced a partnership with energy infrastructure company Renexia to begin planning commercial deployment of its clean energy systems in Italy, though significant technical hurdles remain.
Editor’s note: General Fusion is set to become the first publicly traded pure-play fusion energy company on a major exchange. In late 2025, Renewal Fuels, which has been trading on OTC markets for more than a decade, agreed to acquire Kepler Fusion Technologies in a reverse merger. The transaction closed in February 2026, and the combined company has rebranded as American Fusion.
Solid-state batteries are safer and more capable—but harder to mass-produce. They also represent an opportunity for non-Chinese companies to get back in the game.
I was really looking forward to July 4, and not just because I love a poolside barbecue. This year the American holiday also marked a big symbolic deadline for US nuclear power.
Last year the Trump administration set a goal to see three new microreactors achieve criticality, a technical milestone establishing that a reactor can sustain a chain reaction, by the nation’s 250th birthday. And just in time, four reactors did so.
It was a lofty goal, and seeing not just three but four companies meet it is certainly a positive sign for emerging nuclear technologies at a time when the world is facing increased need to increase electricity supply and address climate change with emissions-free technologies.
But achieving criticality doesn’t mean a reactor is ready to provide electricity for the grid (or at all, for that matter). Let’s untangle what this program’s success could mean for nuclear power in the US, and where these companies might go from here.
The Reactor Pilot Program essentially opened a special door for prototype reactors to fast-track development. In August, the US Department of Energy selected 11 reactor projects for the program and offered them land and support from the national labs system. These are all microreactors; the large light-water reactors that dominate the grid today are tens or even hundreds of times their size.
Antares Nuclear was the first to achieve criticality, reaching the milestone in June in its Mark-0 test reactor. Reactors from Valar Atomics, Deployable Energy, and Aalo Atomics followed. (Aalo hit the mark in the early hours of July 4—an inspiring example of just barely meeting a deadline.)
The speed with which these companies hit this milestone is impressive, especially in an industry known for massive projects that frequently blow past deadlines and stated budgets. (Valar, Antares, and Aalo were all founded in 2023, and Deployable started in 2025.) But reaching criticality and running a reactor that can produce electricity are two totally different things.
All these reactors reached what’s called zero-power criticality. Basically, it’s a test of whether you can start a nuclear chain reaction, with no meaningful power coming from the reactor. “A zero-power-criticality test can be achieved without making real engineering progress on fuel or design,” Kathryn Huff, a former assistant secretary for nuclear energy and chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said on an episode of the Catalyst podcast earlier this year.
Now, with the completion of this program, the companies will need to continue their work to make power, which could involve some big technical challenges. In some cases they’ll need to add significant equipment, like the cooling systems to transfer the heat out of the reactor core.
The companies are projecting aggressive timelines moving forward. Aalo says it’s already begun work on the second reactor and plans to produce 10 megawatts of electricity to power an on-site data center in 2027. Deployable Energy says it plans to deploy commercial reactors by 2028.
I tend to take timelines from startups, especially in nuclear, with a grain of salt. Not only are these remarkably complex technical machines, but companies often run into problems outside their own control, like regulatory challenges—which these new projects could soon face.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in charge of civilian and commercial nuclear use in the US, and historically, the process to get nuclear reactors approved has been quite slow.
The agency did propose a new framework for microreactor approvals earlier this year, which is designed to speed up the process—but it’s yet to be seen how quickly things will move. (And it’s worth noting here that some nuclear experts have questioned whether the agency under the Trump administration is loosening nuclear rules too much.)
Some nuclear supporters aren’t applauding the microreactor milestone. Federal focus on the program is an “unhelpful diversion” from goals to meaningfully increase nuclear capacity, according to one analysis by Third Way, a public policy think tank. “Artificially accelerating project timelines is a short-term solution, not a long-term fix,” the memo reads.
Criticality is a big first step, but a lot will still have to happen for any of these microreactors to come online, much less for these small reactors to be a significant source of electricity for the grid.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
— Mike Torres, a former executive at Amazon, Microsoft and Google, has joined Dropbox as the company’s first chief product officer.
“As a product leader, joining a company that helped pioneer product-led growth is energizing…” Torres said on LinkedIn. “In this role, my focus will be simple: help Dropbox ship the right things at the right time for our customers.”
Seattle-based Torres comes to Dropbox from Google, where he served as vice president of product for Chrome. Before that, he spent more than a decade at Amazon, most recently as VP of Kindle. At Microsoft, he led teams working on OneDrive, Windows Movie Maker and other products.
Chris Sambar. (LinkedIn Photo)
— T-Mobile appointed Chris Sambar as chief enterprise officer, effective no later than Oct. 14. Sambar will lead the Bellevue, Wash.-based company’s small- and medium-sized business, enterprise and government units.
Sambar joins from Public Storage, where he serves as chief operating officer. He was previously at fellow communications giant AT&T for more than two decades, most recently as a president of the company’s global network organization overseeing architecture, engineering, construction, operations, tower strategy and program management.
“Chris is a seasoned wireless industry leader with proven experience including expanding high-growth businesses and seizing market opportunities,” said Srini Gopalan, CEO of T-Mobile.
T-Mobile made two additional C-suite changes:
Mike Katz. (LinkedIn Photo)
Chief Business & Product Officer Mike Katz has resigned to “pursue new professional interests,” according to a press release. Katz was with the company for more than 28 years and will remain in a strategic advisory role through the end of the year. Gopalan offered his “sincere gratitude to Mike for his incredible contributions to T‑Mobile.” Read more about his departure in this GeekWire story.
André Almeida‘s C-suite role has expanded and his title has been updated to chief marketing, brand and broadband officer. He previously served as chief broadband, enterprise and emerging business officer. In the new position, Almeida will help oversee the company’s consumer wireless and broadband businesses.
Kevin LaChapelle. (LinkedIn Photo)
— After 37 years with Microsoft, Xbox Vice President Kevin LaChapelle was among those laid off this week, with the cuts hitting the gaming division particularly hard as the company aims to overhaul the division.
LaChapelle was hired by the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant in 1989 as a software design engineer and joined the Xbox team in 2012.
“I will say my fondest memories are of leading the team of very talented engineers who built the Xbox Backward Compatibility program,” LaChapelle said on LinkedIn. When Phil Spencer, then head of Xbox, announced the program at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2015, LaChapelle added, “The audience’s reaction was unbelievable.”
Adam Shoenfeld. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Adam Schoenfeld has resigned as chief marketing officer for Inflection.io. In April, the B2B marketing automation company acquired Keyplay, a Seattle startup co-founded and previously led by Schoenfeld. The deal reunited Schoenfeld and Inflection CEO Aaron Bird, who have known each other for many years and have collaborated and invested in each other’s companies.
Schoenfeld said on LinkedIn that he “had the best of intentions” when he committed to the acquisition, but then burnout hit him. “I was embarrassed and disappointed in myself. I dreaded telling the team. I didn’t want to bail and let people down… I’m sure others have been in this place,” he added. “After facing the hard conversations, I’m excited to look ahead.”
Schoenfeld remains a part-time CMO advisor for the business and also produces Adam’s GTM Report, which provides data-backed research, maps and tools for leaders and builders in the space.
— Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space Technologies named former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil to its board. Weil has held leadership roles at Planet, Meta, Instagram and Twitter and also serves on the boards of Cisco and The Nature Conservancy.
Stoke Space builds reusable rockets and raised $860 million from investors in its latest round. It’s No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
— Skippy Shaw has joined fusion startup Helion Energy as director of Washington government affairs. The Everett, Wash.-based company is working to build what could be the world’s first commercial fusion facility in Central Washington. Shaw joins Helion from The Nature Conservancy, where she led state governmental relations for TNC’s Washington chapter.
— David Langworthy announced that he has resigned from Microsoft after nearly 25 years, leaving the role of architect for Azure OpenAI. Langworthy, who worked as a founding member of Azure OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, GenAI, MAC, and Azure AI Services, is the founder and CTO of a stealth startup based in Bellevue.
— Carissa Allen has also left Microsoft, departing as director of strategy for the company’s events, including Ignite and AI Tour. On LinkedIn, Allen called her resignation after nearly 30 years “my Valiant Reboot Project (no “retirement” here) because you know I’m not finished yet.”
— And in case you missed it:
Bill Colleran, a veteran technology executive who previously led Impinj, has joined Seattle-based AI coding startup Adronite as CEO. Edward Rothschild, who co-founded and previously led the company, is transitioning to chief technology officer. Read more in this GeekWire story.
Nick Parker, a 26-year Microsoft veteran who led the company’s worldwide commercial sales business, is leaving to become Nvidia’s new sales chief, effective Aug. 24. Read more here.
Anthony Agueda, a third-generation California dairy farmer, pulls a rake through a bed of dark, wet wood chips on his family’s land in Hickman, a tiny town in the state’s agricultural heartland.
He reaches down with both hands and pulls up a clump of muck, turning it over to reveal a half-dozen squirming red earthworms. There are likely hundreds of thousands more wriggling just under the surface of the three-foot mound of wood and crushed river rock before us, which stretches across the equivalent of six football fields. These natural materials form a biofilter that may dramatically cut the methane, nitrous oxide, and water pollution generated by the massive amounts of manure that hundreds of Holstein cows produce each day.
Agueda’s family business, the Alberto Dairy, was one of the first cattle operations in California to adopt this approach to manure treatment, developed and patented by the Chilean company BioFiltro. Eight more of these so-called vermifiltration systems are already operating on US dairies, according to the company, while another 16 are under construction or set to be next year, nearly all of them in California.
Vermifiltration is just one of a variety of methods that farmers, companies, and scientists are employing to drive down manure pollution as the livestock industry faces growing pressure to address the environmental harms from one of the smelliest parts of the business. California, easily the nation’s largest milk producer, has established a handful of programs to promote their adoption, including one initiative that has funneled more than a billion dollars to farms.
Researchers stress that much more work needs to be done to determine the most effective approaches, the trade-offs between them, and their success over the long term, under actual farm conditions.
Agueda says that he and his family recognized the need to adopt new practices as environmental rules tightened. They were drawn to vermifiltration because it’s simple and relatively cheap compared with other, higher-tech options.
“California daily farmers are constantly facing more and more regulation,” says Agueda, standing alongside one of the farm’s free-stall barns. “This makes me excited, because it shows how we are part of the solution.”
The growing manure problem
Manure is responsible for a significant portion of the climate pollution from livestock operations. The World Resources Institute estimates that manure management on dairy and swine farms accounts for 1.6% of the US’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Globally, manure storage and processing makes up about 10% of the livestock industry’s contributions to climate change.
“Farms have become larger in the past two decades or so, so there’s much more manure—and that has to be stored somewhere,” says Swati Hegde, the organization’s global manager of agricultural methane.
Typically, cattle and swine farms spray manure into lagoons or tanks, creating a foul-smelling, low-oxygen slurry in which microorganisms known as methanogens thrive. They gobble up hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and other compounds and produce methane as a by-product. Other microbes in the mix produce smaller amounts of nitrous oxide.
A pair of Holstein cows poke their heads through the rails of a free-stall barn at the Alberto Dairy.
JOE PROUDMAN/UC DAVIS
Both are particularly potent greenhouse gases, with as much as 30 to nearly 275 times the warming power of carbon dioxide, respectively, over a century.
The slurry is often spread onto fields to add nutrients to the soil. When it’s done excessively or improperly, this part of the practice can pollute soil or groundwater with drug residues, pathogens like salmonella and E. coli, and nitrates. Nitrates that leach into drinking water have been linked to a variety of human health risks. And those that flow into rivers, lakes, and coastal waters can spawn algae blooms that poison fish, block sunlight, suck up oxygen, or form large coastal dead zones devoid of marine life.
Policy drivers
A number of regions, nations, and states have passed regulations or offered subsidies designed to limit the pollution from livestock manure, but so far, most of the major initiatives have focused on water contamination rather than greenhouse-gas emissions.
The European Union, for instance, restricts the amount of manure that farmers can apply to fields and requires member nations to monitor nitrate levels in ground and surface water. The US’s Clean Water Act requires large livestock operations to obtain permits and develop manure management plans that limit pollution.
But California has arguably done the most to use government policy specifically to drive down the methane emissions from livestock. The dairy industry accounts for about 45% of the state’s pollution from the potent greenhouse gas, and more than half of that comes from manure, according to the government’s estimates.
In 2016, the state enacted a law that requires dairies, landfills, and other businesses to cut methane emissions 40% below 2013 levels by 2030, as part of a broader effort to reduce pollution from powerful but short-lived greenhouse gases. The measure directed the California Air Resources Board, the state’s main climate regulatory agency, to set up various incentive programs to encourage these industries to shift to cleaner practices.
“In terms of bang for your buck, short-term benefits, methane can go a long way toward reaching climate goals,” says Tawny Mata, director of California’s Office of Agricultural Resilience and Sustainability.
Between these various programs—and falling livestock numbers in the state—the dairy sector is on track to reduce annual methane emissions by the equivalent of 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030, the state estimates. That would still fall about 4 million tons short of the target under the 2016 law.
The downsides of dairy digesters
Excluding the decline in herd populations—which has been driven by growing international competition and rising costs—the vast majority of California’s estimated methane reductions come from the use of what are known as anaerobic digesters. This technology entails covering the slurry lagoons to prevent methane from leaking into the air and then piping the biogas into separate vessels, where it’s cleaned and converted into natural gas.
Under California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard program, dairies that use digesters to produce gas delivered into pipelines can earn credits and sell them to petroleum refineries and other major polluters, as a means of helping those companies meet their own emissions reduction requirements.
The gas can then fuel power plants, produce hydrogen, or power natural-gas vehicles. These uses still release carbon dioxide, but the state considers it a climate win because it avoids the release of methane, which traps even more heat.
The rich revenue stream from California’s program has spurred hundreds of US farms to install anaerobic digesters over the last decade. Since 2020, it has produced more than $1 billion for farms, Cal Poly researchers noted in a paper last year.
But there are a variety of concerns about this approach.
The first is that it’s viable only for farms with about 2,000 cattle or more, because the equipment is very expensive to install, says Frank Mitloehner, a professor and chair of the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis.
“For the lion’s share of dairies, digesters will not be a solution,” he says.
Since the manure is often still spread across fields, digesters also do little to address the water pollution problems—and can even exacerbate them because of some of the chemistry that occurs during that process.
Yet the huge subsidies flowing to digesters have steered money, energy, and attention away from other solutions that may offer better overall environmental outcomes, says Danny Cullenward, a senior fellow with the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, who has closely studied the California program.
“That is really not a solution at scale, and it’s diverting a huge fraction of precious resources to what I think is mostly not the right answer,” he says.
Alternatives
The high up-front costs and limitations of digesters have spawned growing interest in alternative solutions—many of which work by reducing the formation of methane in the first place instead of turning that methane into a sellable fuel.
One of the cheapest, easiest, and most popular approaches, known as solid separation, uses simple machinery like a screw press to squeeze much of the water out of the manure slurry. The remaining solids are dry and exposed to open air, shifting away from the oxygen-free conditions in which methane is readily produced.
Other methods include increasing acidity in lagoons, bubbling air through them, or adding methane-eating microbes to the slurry, all of which alter the chemistry in ways that promise to reduce the amount of methane released. One company, Sedron Technologies of Sedro-Woolley, Washington, has also developed a sort of high-tech solid separation approach that extracts several marketable products from the animal waste, including a liquid organic fertilizer.
The state of California set up a pair of additional programs to help smaller farmers adopt some of these other approaches, dubbed the Alternative Manure Management Program and the Dairy Plus Program.
The bulk of the funds have gone to solid separation systems. But the state has provided more than $18 million to support 15 vermifiltration projects. The Alberto Dairy has received nearly $2 million between the two programs.
Oreo cows
As I drove down a dusty road bordering the dairy, black-and-white bovines, affectionately known as Oreo cows, stretched their heads through the rails of an open barn, nibbling on golden silage scattered along the structure. Agueda’s grandfather Antonio Alberto founded the dairy 45 years ago in nearby Atwater, California, but eventually settled in Hickman, population 604, in 1989.
A series of large metal contraptions separate most of the solids from the manure wastewater.
JOE PROUDMAN/UC DAVIS
It was mid-March but already above 80 °F in the Central Valley, which is walled off from the cool Pacific air by the coastal mountain range. Knee-high oat stalks swayed in fields that stretched to a line of almond trees in the distance.
Agueda, who graduated from Fresno State last year and now helps lead the operations on the farm, met me and UC Davis’s Mitloehner, who has studied the effects of vermifiltration, along the side of the barn. (UC Davis has no affiliation with the farm, but the university helped facilitate the meeting.)
He led us along dirt lanes as he explained the workings of the vermifiltration system, which they began using in October 2024.
As before, a flush system washes manure from the floors of the barns into a large collection pit. But now a set of pumps funnels it through a series of large V-shaped metal contraptions standing on a nearby concrete pad, where mechanical screens separate most of the solids from the water.
A conveyor belt takes away the solids, which the farm composts for cow bedding or fertilizer. The remaining liquid moves through a system of pipes, first to settling ponds and then on to an irrigation system suspended above the vermifiltration beds. The long, tubular structure runs over the mounds on wheels set in gravel tracks, wetting the wood chips as it goes. The worms and various microbes residing in the biofilter then set to work consuming much of the remaining solid material, according to BioFiltro.
An irrigation system sprinkles wastewater onto the vermifiltration beds.
JOE PROUDMAN/UC DAVIS
“Once the water is sprinkled on top, it takes about four hours from beginning to end for it to percolate through and drain to the end,” Agueda says.
He then defers to Mitloehner to explain the science of what happens as it does, adding, “I’m just the dairyman.”
The science
Mitloehner says he was skeptical of BioFiltro’s claims when he first heard them, particularly the assertion that the system could nearly eliminate nitrogen and, with it, the various forms of pollution it can produce, including ammonia and nitrates.
So he decided to study a similar setup at the Fanelli Dairy, an operation in Hilmar, California, about 20 miles to the south. He and colleagues monitored the emissions from wastewater samples that were taken from the system before and after the liquid moved through the filter. In a paper published in 2018, the researchers concluded that vermifiltration reduced ammonia emissions from the resulting water by about 90%.
BioFiltro, whose tagline is “worm-powered solutions,” states that its technology “catalyzes the digestive power of worms and microbes to remove up to 99% of wastewater contaminants.”
But Mitloehner questions how big a role the invertebrates play in the process, calling it “kind of a catchy narrative.”
His take is simpler: The rocks and wood chips form a porous filter that replaces the anaerobic environment of a manure lagoon with an aerobic one. And in that oxygen-rich environment, different types of microbes thrive.
His study suggests that these microbes are highly effective at converting nitrogen compounds in manure into nitrogen gas—a benign gas that makes up 78% of Earth’s atmosphere—instead of ammonia. That’s notable because while ammonia in manure acts as a fertilizer when it’s applied to fields, it also converts into the nitrates that can leach into groundwater.
Several more recent studies, which were partially or fully funded by BioFiltro and one of its regional distribution partners, Organix, produced similarly promising results. For instance, a 2022 study in Bioresource Technology Reports, also conducted at the Fanelli Dairy, concluded that the filter removed nearly 85% of the nitrogen in the operation’s wastewater.
But a befuddling wrinkle is that when it came to methane, those studies and Mitloehner’s independent one found nearly opposite results.
While both the company- and partner-supported studies concluded that the filter eliminated the vast majority of methane pollution, Mitloehner’s study found that methane emissions were nearly 85% higher than those from the lagoon.
In a follow-up email exchange, Mitloehner stressed that it’s not appropriate to compare his results with those that emerged from the other study at the same dairy, because the teams used very different methods, instruments, and measurement periods. Moreover, the focus of his research was the effect on nitrogen.
Anthony Agueda pulls a rake through a vermifiltration bed at his family’s dairy.
JOE PROUDMAN/UC DAVIS
He said it’s “entirely reasonable” and “biologically plausible” that vermifiltration could substantially reduce methane emissions, simply by creating that aerobic environment.
“That said, I would be cautious about calling the magnitude of the reduction a fully settled issue,” he added. “While the available studies, including those you mentioned, point in the same general direction, the number of independent studies remains relatively limited, and results can vary.”
Patrick Beckett, BioFiltro’s vice president of quality and R&D, also stressed that there were crucial differences in the methodology of Mitloehner’s study that could have affected his methane findings.
In addition, he said the Organix funding came by way of a Washington state grant and described that study and the one BioFiltro supported as “high quality, peer reviewed” research that “has been submitted to other technical third parties for review and acceptance.”
Beckett says he agrees that additional independent reviews of BioFiltro’s systems is “fair and necessary” and notes that other studies have occurred or are underway.
“That said,” Beckett wrote in an emailed response to questions from MIT Technology Review, “it seems unreasonable that BioFiltro would be held to a standard of not being allowed to invest in technical research by qualified third parties to learn more about the capabilities of our technology, and use the results of that research to enter new markets and to understand the value we can bring to projects or entire industries beyond water treatment.”
Milk money
BioFiltro is already building a business model around the available findings.
The company, founded in 2009, has been selling its vermifiltration systems or services to other industries around the world for years. It says there are around 225 operating in nine countries, at sites including municipal wastewater facilities, wineries, fruit processors, and other industrial operations.
But BioFiltro, whose US headquarters are in Davis, California, is seeing increasing demand among dairies as the industry faces growing pressure to address manure pollution. Late last year, it raised $35 million that the business says it will use, in large part, to accelerate its growth across the sector.
In an interview, Sarah Ploss, the company’s senior vice president of agriculture, explains the basic financial template for how it works with dairies: BioFiltro pays for, owns, installs, and operates the system. The farm, in turn, covers a share of the additional electricity, operations, and maintenance costs.
Ploss says the dairy gets back clean water and the ability to focus on what it does best: producing milk. For its part, BioFiltro can generate carbon credits from the reduction in greenhouse gases, which it can then sell to makers of consumer packaged goods that are looking for ways to address the emissions throughout their supply chains, she says.
BioFiltro says that Verra, which sets standards for and assesses greenhouse-gas crediting projects, has registered two of its projects: the Royal Dairy and Moxee Dairy, both in Washington.
The Swiss confectionary giant Nestlé has bought more than 150,000 credits generated by the Royal Dairy’s vermifiltration system, according to an offsets database managed by CarbonPlan, which assesses the scientific integrity of climate action programs. Ploss said that BioFiltro has sold more than 200,000 credits from the project so far, and adds that it secured a different buyer for a project in California, which she said she couldn’t name.
The vermifiltration system has cleaned up the water that circulates through various parts of the Alberto Dairy operation.
JOE PROUDMAN/UC DAVIS
Three additional projects involving BioFiltro systems took the initial steps to become registered through Verra but didn’t move forward and weren’t built, Ploss said in an email. The request for registration for the Alberto Dairy estimates that the system there will reduce emissions by the equivalent of more than 30,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
BioFiltro could take advantage of another revenue source as well: selling what it calls vermicompost, a rich soil additive composed of the leftover materials in the biofilter, including worm castings—a combination of cocoons, excrement, and remains. At retail, worm castings can run more than $500 per ton.
Beckett says the company is still developing that market but notes that it could help the industry offset rising fertilizer costs.
“I think we’re going to enable a larger-scale use and adoption of it that could be meaningful to agriculture,” he says, adding: “These will become basically soil production facilities.”
Concerns
Determining how well vermifiltration and other manure management approaches work will require more time and more research, experts say.
Katharine Dickson, an agricultural emissions scientist who recently finished a postdoctoral program at UC Davis, says there should be in-the-field accounting to ensure that any of these methods are working as well as hoped—or to the degree government policy programs assume. All of which is tricky to achieve given the dynamic biological processes playing out in live animals and microbial communities on open farms, she adds.
“Vermifiltration, for example, depends on a live earthworm population whose performance is sensitive to temperature, moisture, and toxicity, and can shift with seasonal conditions or changes in herd size and manure characteristics on a given farm,” Dickson said in an email.
The use of carbon credits to earn money from vermifiltration projects raises a different set of potential concerns. Most notably, if the methane decreases aren’t as significant as assumed, the projects could receive more credits than they deserve.
There are more complicated issues as well. For the carbon credit system to make any real difference in the net amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, it must produce emissions reductions that wouldn’t have occurred without that financial incentive. If it was going to happen anyway—as a result, say, of rich grants, legal pressures, or looming policies—the buyer of the credits can’t legitimately claim to have made any progress on its own climate emissions, says Grayson Badgley, a research scientist at CarbonPlan.
On that point, if California agriculture doesn’t meet its looming methane reduction targets, the carrots the state offers could be replaced by sticks: The California Air Resources Board recently began discussing rules that would force, rather than nudge, the sector to meet the 40% reduction required under the 2016 law.
“If lots of dairies are cleaning up their act ahead of pending regulation, it really does seem like the regulation, not offsets, is driving that action,” Badgley wrote in an email. “Trying to collect as many offsets prior to that deadline might adhere to the rules of the market, while still raising questions about whether those rules have enabled real climate action.”
Investing in sustainability
Beckett disagreed that the possibility of forthcoming regulations undermines the case for generating carbon credits from current projects.
“It’s true the state has net reduction targets that it hopes to meet, but it’s clear the state of California has favored market-based solutions and tried to provide some support via grant programs,” he wrote. “I’m on the science side of our business, not the business development side, but still think I can tell you with complete transparency that we would not have systems installed on [California] dairies without the sale of voluntary carbon credits.”
Ploss also stressed that the company goes through a careful “validation and verification process” on the farms to understand how much vermifiltration reduces greenhouse gases.
“We’ve got sensors and cameras and all sorts of stuff so that we can look into any of our systems, 24-7,” Ploss says. “We know through sampling. We know through what’s going through the system, what came out of the system. We know by all the measurements on any given month: What did that system do in terms of generating carbon credits?”
Agueda also disputes the critique.
“The installation of the vermifiltration system would not have occurred without the ability to generate carbon credits,” he said in an email. “The project required a substantial capital investment, and the anticipated carbon credit revenue was a key factor in making the investment financially feasible.”
Anthony Agueda helps to lead the operations at the Alberto Dairy.
JOE PROUDMAN/UC DAVIS
California decided to incentivize vermifiltration, along with other approaches, because it can offer multiple benefits, including cleaner water, less nitrogen, and lower greenhouse-gas emissions, while also creating economic value from manure, wrote Roberta Franco, a senior environmental scientist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture, in an emailed response to questions from MIT Technology Review.
She added that the decision was based on a number of studies as well as the 2022 recommendations from a task force composed of scientists, technical experts, and others.
Even if California has made missteps, most notably in funneling too much money to anaerobic digesters at the expense of other methods, it’s created a test lab that’s achieved real progress and provided lessons that other regions can learn from.
One way or another, more parts of the world will need to set up similar programs, offering greater support or creating stricter rules, if we hope to really drive down the emissions from manure, says Maria Bowman, who leads the Agricultural Nitrogen Transformation Program at Spark Climate, a San Francisco nonprofit.
For his part, Agueda says that the vermifiltration system has offered a number of benefits to his family’s farm, at little additional cost to them. By cleaning up the water that cycles back through their flush and irrigation systems, the biofilter has reduced clogging, decreased odors, and improved the health of the herd.
He says that each generation modernizes dairy farming in its own way. His father and uncle, for instance, incorporated computers and data management systems into the daily operations of the Alberto Dairy. He believes it’s the responsibility of his generation to make a similar effort to reduce the pollution that’s long plagued the sector.
“We knew that in the next generation we have to invest in environmental sustainability,” he says. “We didn’t know if it was gonna work or not, but we’re very happy with how it’s turned out.”
AI data centers face mounting community backlash and local moratoriums, while surging power demands knock tech giants off course from their climate ambitions. Could fusion be the solution to both problems, and could two Seattle-area companies provide the fix?
Helion Energy is betting on it. The company signed an unprecedented agreement to sell fusion energy to Microsoft for a Central Washington data center. Armed with a $1.5 billion war chest, Helion is sprinting to reach its 2028 deadline to flip the switch on that power plant, which it hopes will be the world’s first to commercially produce electricity from fusion.
The soaring demand for clean energy is driving interest and investment, said David Kirtley, Helion’s CEO and co-founder. “It’s enabled us to ramp up our timelines and go faster than we had originally planned.”
Nearby, competitor Zap Energy has raised $330 million and secured Department of Energy backing. While ambitious, the startup is taking a more cautious approach. Zap recently announced it will jointly pursue fusion’s conventional cousin — nuclear fission — as a near-term revenue source and a hedge on its fusion bet.
“This isn’t a pivot,” said Benj Conway, Zap’s president and co-founder. “By integrating them into a single platform, we can move faster, reduce risk and build a more enduring company.”
Helion and Zap belong to a global cohort of entrepreneurs trying to harness the power of the sun. Their goal is to create a “star in a jar” here on Earth to produce nearly limitless clean energy. For decades, researchers have chased this milestone — and some believe the industry is finally getting close.
Inside Helion’s sprint to 2028
Helion Energy is building Tiny Merge, a fusion device that is one-eighth the size of its seventh generation protype and will serve as a testbed for faster iterations of its designs. (Helion Photo)
A visit to Helion starts with a gauntlet of security hurdles: getting past an outdoor guard in a booth, ID checks and stowing phones in locked cubbies. Inside its R&D space in Everett, Wash., Helion operates Polaris, a 60-foot-long, seventh-generation prototype that uses magnets to compress plasma, the super-hot state of matter required for fusion. Here is how it works:
The Collision: The machine creates magnetic fields at both ends that launch and squeeze tiny blobs of plasma containing light atoms toward the center, where they collide at 1 million miles per hour.
The Capture: As the ions fuse and release energy, the plasma expands against the magnetic field. This movement creates an electric current captured directly as electricity, similar to regenerative braking in electric vehicles.
The commercial device will ultimately run on isotopes of hydrogen and helium, and aims to reach temperatures of 200 million degrees Celsius — more than 10-times hotter than the center of the sun.
But significant technical hurdles remain. In July 2025, Helion broke ground on its 50-megawatt plant, Orion, in Malaga, Wash. The facility must be operational in two years to meet its contract with Microsoft.
Helion’s approach has been to build larger and larger prototypes as it advances its technology, but the company took a detour this spring to build a fusion device about one-eighth the size of Polaris.
“This is where we’re building the next smaller machine, Tiny Merge,” said Manav Singh, Helion’s director of electrical engineering, on a recent tour. “Step in, right here.”
Behind a massive Wizard of Oz-worthy curtain was the downsized, tubular fusion device. It bristled with metal protuberances that will connect it to power sources to send surges of electricity into the machine.
Tiny Merge could be viewed as a worrisome sign of backtracking to resolve technical issues. However, the company maintains its strategy always left room for smaller devices to allow for faster testing and iterations.
“There’s a few much more deep investigations we want to do,” Singh said. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
Zap’s dual core bet
Zap Energy’s FuZE-Q fusion device. (Zap Photo)
A four-minute drive from Helion sits rival Zap Energy. The startup is building its technology on a physics phenomenon known as the Z-pinch, which uses a powerful electrical current to generate its own magnetic field to confine plasma.
Zap’s system operates through a distinct process:
Plasma Generation: Hydrogen gas is injected into the device and blasted with energy, creating a 2-foot-long strand of plasma resembling a tame lightning bolt.
Heat Absorption: When the Z-pinch triggers fusion, released neutrons are captured by a surrounding liquid metal blanket (bismuth in testing, lithium for commercial use).
Power Generation: The neutrons carry intense heat, which is then converted into usable energy.
Zap is running three fusion devices that measure about 12 feet long, each focused on fine-tuning a specific challenge in its system.
Despite hitting key milestones, concerns about the timeline for reaching commercially-ready fusion triggered Zap’s move to add fission to its plans, making it the first fusion company to do so.
Zap is now working to deploy a 10-megawatt fission microreactor based on legacy Toshiba designs, giving it a more certain path to an operational power plant than fusion currently offers.
The company says the two strategies share technologies that could accelerate the development of both. A key technical overlap is the use of liquid metals; the fission device is cooled by liquid sodium, which behaves similarly to the liquid bismuth and lithium used in its fusion design.
“Fission gives us a path to deploy. Fusion gives us a path to transform,” Zap CEO Zabrina Johal, said in April. “Bringing them together is how we do both.”
A global clean energy race
Construction on Helion’s planned Orion power plant in Malaga, Wash. (Helion Photo)
More than 50 companies globally are pursuing fusion power, including two additional Pacific Northwest ventures: Seattle-based Avalanche Energy and British Columbia’s General Fusion.
Among the heavily funded contenders is Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Armed with nearly $3 billion, the company plans to build a plant in Virginia, home to the nation’s largest data center hub. China remains another major wildcard, investing billions of undisclosed dollars into its own domestic fusion ventures.
As work continues, enthusiasm grows alongside persistent skepticism. Some experts doubt cost-competitive fusion can ever be achieved, while others believe commercial viability is still decades away — too late to solve the immediate energy needs of the AI boom.
Laura Berzak Hopkins, deputy chief research officer at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, remains cautiously optimistic about the sector’s trajectory.
“We’ve made incredible progress, and we are reaching ever closer, but there still remain these major scientific and technological hurdles,” Berzak Hopkins said. However, she added, “new capabilities and new knowledge really bring us to this exciting cusp.”
Whether Helion and its peers will prove the skeptics wrong remains to be seen, but the data center energy crisis ensures the world will be watching.
Manav Singh, Helion Energy, director of electrical engineering
Matthew Thompson, Zap Energy, senior vice president of fission technology and former vice president of systems engineering and pulsed power
Laura Berzak Hopkins, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, associate laboratory director for Strategy and Partnerships, and deputy chief research officer
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