Nuclear Fusion Power Generation Countdown: State-backed Teams Just Lined Up for 2045, How Dare Private Companies Shout 2033?

Article | Foreseeing Energy

In January 2026, a 1 billion yuan financing was deposited into Xinghuan Juneng’s account. This company, less than five years old, just broke the record for the largest private nuclear fusion financing in China, led by Future Industry Fund under Shanghai Guotou. According to their plan, a commercial demonstration reactor will be built around 2033—12 years earlier than the national timetable announced by China National Nuclear Corporation’s chief scientist, Duan Xuru.

This time gap is creating the most subtle tension in the fusion race. 2025 is regarded by industry insiders as the year of fusion commercialization, with domestic private fusion financing ranking second globally. In the first half of 2025 alone, total disclosed financing exceeded 11.5 billion yuan, compared to nearly zero before 2019. Companies like XinAo Technology, Energy Singularity, Xinghuan Jueneng, and Nova Fusion have rapidly emerged, exploring diverse technical routes from high-temperature superconducting tokamaks to field-reversed configurations and magnetic compression.

During the Two Sessions, delegate Duan Xuru provided an official timeline: ignition experiments in 2027, construction of engineering test reactors by 2035, and commercial demonstration reactors by 2045. However, the capital market clearly does not intend to follow this pace. The question is: does the influx of private capital mean industry acceleration, or could it turn into another bubble?

What Are Billions of Capital Betting On?

Going back to 2017, when XinAo Group first invested in fusion research, there was almost no other private company in China daring to touch this field. Eight years later, XinAo has invested a total of 4.5 billion yuan, built the “Xuanlong-50U” experimental device, and in 2025 achieved the world’s first high-confinement discharge of hydrogen-boron plasma. This Hebei-based clean energy company chose a hydrogen-boron fusion route, different from the mainstream deuterium-tritium fusion, claiming it to be “clean, safe, with readily available fuel and low cost.”

Founded in 2021, Xinghuan Jueneng took a different path. Its founding team comes from Tsinghua University’s Department of Engineering Physics, opting for a miniaturized spherical tokamak route. Industry estimates show that building a large-scale tokamak with energy gain Q>1 costs over 15 billion yuan, while the goal for the miniaturized route is to reduce costs by an order of magnitude. This cost difference is the core logic behind capital investment.

The speed of capital inflow is indeed astonishing. In 2023, annual financing exceeded 5 billion yuan, and in the first half of 2025, it surpassed 11.5 billion yuan. But Chen Zhongyong, an expert from the Ministry of Science and Technology involved in ITER, offered a sober assessment: most of these funded technologies have not yet been fully validated scientifically, let alone engineered.

Where Does the Time Gap Between the National Team and Private Enterprises Come From?

Duan Xuru divides the commercialization of fusion into six stages: principle exploration, scale experiments, ignition experiments, experimental reactors, demonstration reactors, and commercial reactors. China is currently in the third stage, “ignition experiments,” with China’s HL-2M tokamak recently achieving a dual-billion-degree operation—electron temperature of 160 million °C and ion temperature of 117 million °C. He estimates that each of the next three stages will require about ten years to progress.

But private companies clearly lack this patience. Xinghuan Jueneng’s plan is: start construction of the NTST device in Shanghai in 2026, complete engineering verification by 2028, and build a commercial demonstration reactor by 2033. This pace is a full cycle faster than the national team.

The core difference lies in the definition of “commercialization.” Duan Xuru’s standard involves grid-scale power supply, requiring considerations of industry chain maturity, economic viability, and regulatory compliance. Private firms, however, may target more flexible, distributed scenarios—Nova Fusion, for example, aims at AI data centers, with a single reactor output of 50-100 MW, targeting a levelized cost of electricity below 0.1 yuan/kWh. Achieving this cost would mean competing directly with coal, wind, and solar power.

The collision of these two logics is reshaping the industry landscape. Yanjianwen, member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and chairman of Fusion New Energy, notes that the performance of existing low-temperature superconductors still has room for optimization, and high-temperature superconductors are a key breakthrough direction. High-temperature superconducting magnets are also one of the core technologies private firms are betting on. Duan Xuru admits that significant progress in this area could make fusion reactors more compact and shorten development cycles.

The Industry Chain Is Not Yet Formed—Who Will Pay?

In March 2026, Changzhou Economic Development Zone held a Future Industry Conference on Controlled Nuclear Fusion. Zhaoxin Group, a manufacturer of rail transit equipment, signed a cooperation agreement with the Institute of Plasma Physics at Huazhong University of Science and Technology to establish a joint venture for plasma disruption prediction systems.

It’s an interesting scene—an unrelated manufacturing company starting to enter the field. The logic is: if they don’t get involved now, they might miss the opportunity once the industry chain matures.

Similar situations are unfolding in several cities in the Yangtze River Delta. Shanghai has become a hub for fusion startups, with five companies established just in 2025. Xu Guosheng, deputy director of the Institute of Plasma Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, explains that regions are leveraging their strengths—Shanghai focusing on finance, Hefei on R&D, Changzhou on manufacturing.

But the industry chain is still not fully formed. Xu admits that, driven by large-scale project construction, the upstream and downstream of the industry chain are beginning to develop, but “a complete, mature industry chain has not yet formed, nor has it generated positive economic feedback.” Some private fusion companies reveal that, as downstream purchasers, they have had to push forward tasks that should have been handled by the supply chain, such as “manual” assembly of magnets.

This is the most pragmatic challenge behind the private sector boom. Capital can flow in quickly, and multiple technical routes can be explored, but fusion ultimately requires a vast supporting industry chain. Hard problems like plasma disruption, high-energy neutron-resistant materials, and tritium recycling won’t disappear just because of increased funding.

Yanjianwen listed several issues during this year’s Two Sessions: superconducting materials need performance improvements, reliability and stability must be enhanced, there is a significant talent gap, and regulations concerning tritium management need urgent clarification. The Atomic Energy Law, enacted in January this year, still lags behind the industry’s development pace.

Is Rapid Commercialization Really Possible?

The integration of AI is changing R&D efficiency. Duan Xuru mentions that AI has already shown initial success in plasma operation monitoring, control, and instability prediction, potentially solving plasma control challenges. Some industry insiders say AI can currently improve efficiency by 20-30%, with expectations of exponential gains.

Another variable is the catalyzing effect of the national teams’ involvement. Since 2023, two major fusion national teams have been established—CAS’s Institute of Plasma Physics leading a fusion energy project with a registered capital of 14.5 billion yuan, and China Fusion Energy Co., Ltd., backed by the Southwest Institute of Physics of China National Nuclear Corporation, with a registered capital of 15 billion yuan. Industry observers note that “many suppliers are now willing to enter this industry even at a loss, which was hard to imagine before.”

However, obstacles to rapid commercialization remain formidable. An IAEA report states that nearly 40 countries are pursuing fusion plans, but commercialization still faces multiple challenges. The ITER project’s costs have soared from an initial $5 billion to over $22 billion, with schedules repeatedly delayed, serving as a warning to all aggressive commercialization timelines.

Industry experts believe China might replicate its successful paths in wind, solar, and new energy vehicles—by guiding industrial capacity through policy before technological breakthroughs, thus unleashing strong market competitiveness. This is why many private firms are confident about reaching their 2030 targets.

But Xu Guosheng argues that transforming from a fusion research powerhouse to a fusion industry leader requires developing commercially viable, replicable technological solutions in key areas. And this cannot be achieved solely through increased financing.

The 2026 fusion race is playing out a dual game. Private capital bets on the speed at which AI and high-temperature superconductors bend the technological curve, while the national team relies on six decades of scientific accumulation and engineering principles. Their timelines are separated by twelve years, but neither side dares to claim the other is wrong.

After all, humanity has been repeatedly slapped in the face by the “eternal fifty years” myth regarding the “artificial sun.”