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Sam Altman, co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI Inc., speaks during TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 in San Francisco, California, on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2019.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nuclear fusion is the ephemeral holy grail of climate technology. It would provide nearly limitless amounts of clean energy without the byproduct of long-lasting radioactive waste to be managed.

It’s also the biggest bet Silicon Valley luminary Sam Altman has ever made.

“This is the biggest investment I’ve ever made,” Altman told CNBC of his $375 million investment in Helion Energy, announced Friday. It’s part of a larger $500 million round that the start-up will use to complete the construction of a fusion facility near its headquarters in Everett, Washington.

Altman was the president of the Silicon Valley start-up shop Y Combinator from 2014 through 2019 and is now the CEO of Open AI, an organization that researches artificial intelligence, which he co-founded with Elon Musk and others. (Musk has since stepped away, citing conflicts of interest with Tesla’s AI pursuits.) Altman has also been a big proponent of universal basic income, the idea that the government should give every citizen a basic living wage to compensate for technological disruptions that make some jobs irrelevant.

Years ago, Altman had made a list of the technologies he wanted to get involved in, and artificial intelligence and energy topped that list.

Altman visited four fusion companies, and made his first investment of $9.5 million into Helion 2015.

“I immediately upon meeting the Helion founders thought they were the best and their technical approach was the best by far,” he said.

Helion’s approach to fusion

Nuclear fusion is the opposite reaction of nuclear fission: Where fission splits a larger atom into two smaller atoms, releasing energy, fusion happens when two lighter nuclei slam together to form a heavier atom. It’s the way the sun makes energy, and the basis of hydrogen bombs. Helion is one of a handful of start-ups working to control and commercialize fusion as an energy source, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems and TAE Technologies.

Perhaps the best-known fusion project is Iter in Southern France, where about 35 nations are collaborating to build a donut-shaped fusion machine called a tokamak.

Helion does not use a tokamak, said David Kirtley, Helion’s co-founder and CEO. The fusion machine Helion is building is long and narrow.

Helion’s fusion machine
Courtesy Helion

Helion uses “pulsed magnetic fusion,” Kirtley explained. That means the company uses aluminum magnets to compress its fuel and then expand it to get electricity out directly.

Extremely high temperatures are needed to create the create and maintain the delicate state of matter called plasma, where electrons are separated from nuclei, and where fusion can occur.

In June, Helion announced it exceeded 100 million degrees Celsius in its 6th fusion generator prototype, Trenta.

Kirtley compares Helion’s fusion machine to a diesel engine, while older technologies are more like a campfire. With a campfire, you stoke the fire to generate heat. In a diesel engine, you inject the fuel into a container, then compress and heat the fuel until it begins to burn. “And then you use the expansion of it to directly do useful work,” said Kirtley.

“By taking this new fresh approach and some of the old physics, we can we can move forward and do it fast,” Kirtley said. “The systems end up being a lot smaller, a lot faster to iterate, and then that gets us to commercially useful electricity, which is solving the climate change problem, as soon as possible.”

Helion Energy is using aneutronic fusion, meaning “they don’t have a lot high energy neutrons present in their fusion reaction,” according to Brett Rampal, the Director of Nuclear Innovation at the non-profit Clean Air Task Force.

There are still unknowns with aneutronic fusion, Rampal said.

“An aneutronic approach, like Helion Energy is pursuing, could have potential benefits that other approaches do not, but could also have different downsides and challenges to achieving commercial fusion energy production,” Rampal said.

Overall, though, Rampal believes the wave of investment and innovation in fusion over the last two decades is good news for the industry.

“With so much left to be proven for true commercial fusion approaches, coming at the problem from multiple different angles and trying to determine where the best pros and cons lie with individual technologies is exactly where the fusion industry should be right now,” Rampal told CNBC.

Altman’s three-part utopian vision

For Altman, fusion is part of his overall vision of increasing abundance through technological innovation — a vision that stands apart from many investors and thinkers in the climate space.

“Number one, I think it is our best shot to get out of the climate crisis,” Altman said.

More generally, “decreasing the cost of energy is one of the best ways to improve people’s quality of lives,” Altman said. “The correlation there is just incredibly big.”

Altman’s utopian vision encompasses three parts.

Artificial intelligence, Altman said, will drive the cost of goods and services down with exponential increases in productivity. Universal basic income will be necessary to pay people’s cost of living in the transition period where many jobs are eliminated. And virtually limitless, low-cost, green energy is the third part of Altman’s vision for the world.

Helion Energy co-founders, Chris Pihl (L) and David Kirtley (R).
Photo courtesy Helion Energy

“So for the same reason I’m so interested in AI, I think that fusion, as a path to abundant energy, is sort of the other part of the equation to get to abundance,” Altman told CNBC.

“I think fundamentally today in the world, the two limiting commodities you see everywhere are intelligence, which we’re trying to work on with AI, and energy, which I think Helion has the most exciting thing in the entire world happening for right now.”

But Altman knows that fusion has been elusive for decades. “The joke in fusion is that it’s been 30 years away for 50 years,” he said.

Kirtley was similarly dismayed by the seemingly impossibly time frames to commercialize fusion. “I got into fusion, spent a couple of years learning everything I could about fusion and all the typical approaches, and actually pivoted away from fusion. I said that these timelines don’t help us,” Kirtley told CNBC.

He worked with NASA, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) working on space propulsion technology to help humans travel to Mars and beyond.

But the idea of using approaching fusion with new technologies drew Kirtley back.

Kirtley joined his co-founders John Slough, George Votroubek and Chris Pihl to launch Helion in 2013. “We were able to show that there are actually new approaches to fusion that take modern technology — electronics, and fiber optics and computers — that haven’t been applied to the fusion industry as a whole,” Kirtley said.

The Helion Energy team.
Photo courtesy Helion

The money from the round announced on Friday will be used to complete the construction of Polaris, Helion’s 7th generation fusion facility, which it broke ground on in July and which it aims to use to demonstrate net electricity production in 2024.

Other investors in Helion include LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder. Moskovitz also participated again in Friday’s funding round.

The mission is personal for Kirtley, as tackling climate change is for so many. He moved from Southern California to Washington in 2008.

“I watch now Washington summers where we have fires now, and we didn’t when I first moved here,” he said. The urgency is tangible as they are “watching the glaciers melt on Mount Rainier.”

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Toyota raises yearly profit forecast despite an expected $9 billion hit from U.S. tariffs

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Toyota raises yearly profit forecast despite an expected  billion hit from U.S. tariffs

A sign with the Toyota logo in Surrey, England on August, 2023

Peter Dazeley | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Toyota Motor on Wednesday raised the operating profit forecast for its financial year ending in March, while flagging a 1.45 trillion yen hit from U.S. tariffs.

The company, which revised its operating profit outlook to 3.4 trillion yen from 3.2 trillion yen forecast earlier, missed profit estimates for the quarter ended September. 

“Despite the impact of U.S. tariffs, strong demand supported by the competitiveness of our products has led to increased sales volumes mainly in Japan and North America and has expanded value chain profits,” Toyota said in its earnings report.

Here are Toyota’s September quarter results compared with mean estimates from LSEG:

  • Revenue: 12.38 trillion yen (about $81 billion) vs. 12.18 trillion yen
  • Operating profit: 834 billion yen vs. 863.1 billion yen

The world’s largest carmaker by sales volume reported a nearly 28% quarterly drop in profit, year on year, while revenue increased over 8%. Net income reached 972.9 billion yen, up

Toyota released 6-month results — from April to September — and the quarterly numbers have been calculated by CNBC, based on company statement and LSEG data.

The decline in the September quarter’s operating profit represents the second straight drop since the U.S. introduced “reciprocal” tariffs in April. Tokyo in July clinched a trade deal with Washington, bringing down tariffs on its exports to the U.S. to 15% from the 25% initially proposed by President Donald Trump. The 15% duties took effect on Aug. 7.

The company flagged that tariffs remain the largest drag on Toyota’s profit in the U.S., while factors such exchange rate fluctuations and increased expenses hit earnings in Japan, .

A Toyota executive said in the earnings call that the company was “assessing challenges” and “making preparations” for a plan to ship made-in-U.S. vehicles to customers in Japan, as to align with a new investment framework between Tokyo and Washington.

They added that the plan may not be “economically rational,” but could make certain products more available to Japanese customers.

Tariffs bite

The impacts of U.S. tariffs have been sharply felt across Japan’s auto industry, with Japanese shipments of automobiles to the U.S. dropping 24.2% in September, though this was slightly less compared to the 28.4% drop in August.

While Toyota has extensive North American production, about one-fifth of its U.S. sales still depend on Japanese imports and tariff costs on those imports are being absorbed rather than passed through, according to Liz Lee, associate director at Counterpoint Research. 

“We’re expecting profitability to remain under pressure in [the current quarter] as tariff and currency headwinds persist, with gradual improvement likely from the [March quarter] onwards,” Lee told CNBC in a statement.  

“Profitability should recover modestly next fiscal year if trade costs stabilize and the yen weakens, though rising EV competition will continue to cap upside potential,” she added. 

Toyota has increasingly been leaning into electrified vehicles, which accounted for 46.9% of Toyota and Lexus vehicle sales in the first half of its fiscal year. These sales were primarily driven by hybrid electric vehicles in regions such as North America and China.

However, Toyota’s limited lineup of fully electric battery-powered vehicles could leave it more exposed to competition from Chinese EV players in Europe and Southeast Asia, Lee said.

Despite decreasing profits, Toyota has continued to show strong global demand. The company recently reported that vehicle sales, including its luxury brand Lexus, reached 5.3 million in the nine months to September, a 4.7% increase from a year earlier. In it’s earnings report, the company said it would continue to focus on increasing sales volume and cutting costs.

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Nvidia deepens India footprint with $2 billion deep tech alliance to mentor AI startups

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Nvidia deepens India footprint with  billion deep tech alliance to mentor AI startups

Co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang spoke to journalists during a trip to Beijing in July.

Picture Alliance | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Nvidia will help train and mentor emerging deep tech startups in India as a founding member of a $2 billion investment alliance, deepening its presence in the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem.

The U.S. chipmaker has joined the India Deep Tech Alliance (IDTA) — a group of private equity and venture capital investors pledging $2 billion for deep tech investments — as a founding member. Deep tech startups are an umbrella term for emerging companies in semiconductors, space, AI, biotech, robotics, and energy.

The world’s most valuable company will offer technical talks and training through its Nvidia Deep Learning Institute to emerging startups in India.

Nvidia wants to “provide guidance on AI systems, developer enablement, and responsible deployment, and to collaborate with policymakers, investors, and entrepreneurs,” Vishal Dhupar, Nvidia’s managing director of South Asia, said.

Nvidia did not disclose any financial investment, timeline, or training targets, and did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

“Nvidia’s depth of expertise in AI systems, software, and ecosystem-building will benefit our network of investors and entrepreneurs,” said Sriram Viswanathan, founding executive council member of the IDTA.

He told CNBC that the pace of innovation is accelerating in India and there could be a “significant number of Indian deep tech companies of global repute” in the next five years.

The Indian government is also actively encouraging research and innovation in the deep tech space through major initiatives, including over 100 billion rupees ($1.1 billion USD) under its AI Mission and a separate 1 trillion rupees ($11.2 billion) Research, Development and Innovation Scheme Fund targeting deep tech companies.

On Monday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the country will host the AI Impact Summit in February next year.

The event is likely to see the participation of heads of state and top policymakers, along with business leaders such as Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of NVIDIA, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind.

Nvidia’s commitment in India coincides with rising global interest in India’s AI market, where OpenAI counts the country as its second-largest user base. U.S. rivals are also deepening ties: Google recently pledged $15 billion to build an AI hub in the southern city of Visakhapatnam.

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Wall Street is too fixated on the high valuations of tech and speculative stocks, Cramer says

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Wall Street is too fixated on the high valuations of tech and speculative stocks, Cramer says

Some stocks deserve a higher premium, says Jim Cramer

CNBC’s Jim Cramer suggested Wall Street is too fixated the on large valuations of certain tech and speculative stocks, chalking up Tuesday’s market-wide decline in part to Palantir‘s nearly 8% loss despite strong earnings results.

“The larger issue is that we’re at the moment where money managers, when asked if the market’s too expensive, immediately think of the high-flying speculative stocks or those in the high-growth artificial intelligence column, and so they warn you away from the entire asset class,” he said. “These guys don’t think of the other 334 stocks in the S&P 500 that sell for less than 23 times earnings — those aren’t outrageous.”

Declines in Palantir and other artificial intelligence companies helped bring stocks down on Tuesday, with the S&P 500 losing 1.17%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 0.53% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite sinking 2.04%. Palantir managed to beat the estimates and offer solid guidance, citing growth in the artificial intelligence business. But investors worried broadly about the huge valuations of tech giants that have been leading the market to new heights.

Investors who saw Palantir as their “north star” were alarmed by its big pullback after a great quarter, according to Cramer. The fears triggered “a raft of selling” as these investors questioned the market as a whole, he continued.

Palantir can be a tough stock to classify, Cramer suggested, saying it straddles two different market segments — one centered around tech and artificial intelligence, and another focused on speculative stocks. He noted that the data-driven software company is very lucrative and fast growing, and it “defies easy description.” He listed off a number of its business arms — including its work as a defense contractor and as a consultant for companies looking to modernize and improve profitability.

To Cramer, it’s reasonable to consider that there’s nothing wrong with Palantir, and it just needs “to cool off in order to grow into its market capitalization.”

“Sure, there are indeed some stocks that are visibly overvalued, and when you pull them apart, many of these valuations can be justified, some can’t,” he said. “I think the Magnificent Seven can be justified on the pace of the growth that’s ahead of them. Same, ultimately, with Palantir.”

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