Altman`s startup achieves big fusion energy milestone

Helion Energy says it just hit 150 million degrees Celsius inside its Polaris fusion prototype, marking a major fusion energy milestone.

That is about 10 times hotter than the core of the sun.

It is also well above the roughly 100 million degrees most scientists cite as the threshold for sustained commercial fusion.

The company announced the milestone on Feb. 13 and says it is still on track to deliver power to Washington State’s grid by 2028.

Polaris sits near Seattle. At the same time, Helion is building its first commercial plant, Orion, in Malaga, roughly 130 miles away near Microsoft’s expanding data center campus. As we know, power is the first of the 4 AI bottlenecks. The planned facility is rated at 50 megawatts and is supposed to supply electricity under contract to Microsoft. The reactor is not assembled yet and still needs engineering refinements, but the company insists the timeline holds.

Fusion combines atoms instead of splitting them. Heat hydrogen into plasma at extreme temperatures, force atoms together, and you get helium plus a burst of energy. That is how the sun works. On Earth, you have to do it without gravity doing the squeezing for free. Near the end of 2025 Donald Trump announced a merger with a nuclear fusion company.

No fusion company has ever put electricity on the grid. Helion just moved one of the biggest technical hurdles a little further down the field.

The disruption behind the news: AI needs power. Fusion wants to sell it.

If Helion can turn 150 million degrees into net electricity on a 50 megawatt machine by 2028, the power market changes fast.

Not in theory. In procurement spreadsheets.

Start with Microsoft. Data centers are ravenous.

A single hyperscale campus can demand hundreds of megawatts. Utilities are struggling to keep up. If even one 50 megawatt fusion plant works, tech companies suddenly have a new lever. They can lock in long term contracts for clean baseload power that does not depend on wind patterns or gas pipelines.

Helion’s magneto inertial approach matters here. It claims it can convert fusion energy directly into electricity without steam turbines. Cut out turbines and you cut capital cost, maintenance complexity, and cooling water needs. If that works at scale, the cost curve drops sharply compared to traditional tokamak designs that look like trillion-dollar science projects.

There is also a timing play. 2028 is not early 2030s. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is targeting a commercial plant in Virginia in the early 2030s. A five year lead in energy infrastructure is enormous. Utilities sign 20 year contracts. Data center operators plan capacity years in advance. If Helion hits the grid first, it sets the template for pricing, regulation, and financing.

Investors like Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, and Dustin Moskovitz are not betting on a science fair. They are betting on a manufacturing story. Helion is talking about assembly line production of reactors. If that is even partially true, fusion stops being a moonshot and starts being a product category.

What to watch next

Watch for three things over the next 6 to 24 months.

First, proof of net electricity from Polaris or its successor.

Temperature is a milestone. Net power is the business.

Second, construction progress in Malaga.

Steel in the ground tells you more than press releases.

Third, regulatory treatment.

If state and federal agencies fast track fusion as clean energy without the baggage of fission, project timelines shrink dramatically. Deregulation is one of the 5 signs an industry is ripe for disruption.

Fifty megawatts is small compared to a gigawatt nuclear plant. But it is big enough to anchor a data center campus. If Helion delivers even a fraction of what it promises by 2028, utilities and oil majors will not control the future of baseload power anymore.

Fusion has been one of the disruptive technologies that was supposed to arrive way into the future. But now it appears, the ultimate energy source is closer than most realize. If 150 million degrees turns into 50 megawatts on the grid, that would be the moment fusion energy moves from promise to commercial reality.