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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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Elon Musk’s xAI Holdings in talks to raise $20 billion, Bloomberg News reports

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Elon Musk's xAI Holdings in talks to raise  billion, Bloomberg News reports

The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.

Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.

The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.

Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.

Faber Report: Elon Musk held call with current xAI investors, sources say

The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.

“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”

Read the full Bloomberg story here.

— CNBC’s Samantha Subin contributed to this report.

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Alphabet jumps 3% as search, advertising units show resilient growth

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Alphabet jumps 3% as search, advertising units show resilient growth

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.

GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”

The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.

Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.

Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.

Read more CNBC tech news

Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.

During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.

Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.

Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.

Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.

“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.

WATCH: Gemini delivering well for Google, says Check Capital’s Chris Ballard

Gemini delivering well for Google, says Check Capital's Chris Ballard

CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.

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Amazon sellers raise prices after Trump’s China tariff: ‘It’s unsustainable’

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Amazon sellers raise prices after Trump's China tariff: 'It's unsustainable'

An Amazon employee works to fulfill same-day orders during Cyber Monday, one of the company’s busiest days at an Amazon fulfillment center on December 2, 2024 in Orlando, Florida. 

Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Getty Images

For 10 years, Aaron Cordovez has been selling kitchen appliances on Amazon. Now he’s in a bind, because most of his products are manufactured in China.

Cordovez, co-founder of Zulay Kitchen, said his company is moving “as fast as we can” to move production to India, Mexico and other markets, where tariffs are increasing under President Donald Trump, but are mild compared with the levies imposed on goods from China. That process will likely take at least a year or two to complete, he said.

“We’re making our inventory last as long as we can,” Cordovez said in an email.

Zulay is also temporarily raising the price of some of its milk frothers, smores roasting sticks and other products. The company’s popular kitchen strainer now costs $12.99, up from $9.99 before Trump announced his sweeping tariff proposal earlier this month.

Amazon merchants are hiking prices for everything from diaper bags and refrigerator magnets to charm necklaces and other top-selling items as they confront higher import costs. E-commerce software company SmartScout tracked 930 products on Amazon that have seen increased prices since April 9, with an average jump of 29%.

The price hikes affect a range of categories, including clothing, jewelry, household items, office supplies, electronics and toys.

The trade war with China has threatened to upend sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, which accounts for about 60% of the company’s online sales. Many merchants are based in China or rely on the world’s second-largest economy to source and assemble their products.

Sellers are now faced with the conundrum of raising prices or eating the extra costs associated with Trump’s new tariffs. It’s an existential threat for many sellers, who subsist on razor-thin margins and have, for the last several years, dealt with rising costs on Amazon tied to storage, fulfillment, shipping and advertising fees along with pricing pressure from increased competition.

CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC earlier this month that the company was “going to try and do everything we can” to keep prices low for shoppers, including renegotiating terms with some of its suppliers. But he acknowledged some third-party sellers will “need to pass that cost” of tariffs on to consumers.

Amazon’s stock price is down 15% so far this year, sliding along with the broader market. The company reports first-quarter earnings next week.

Watch CNBC's full interview with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy

Goods imported from China now face import duties of 145%, though Trump said Wednesday his administration is “actively” talking with China about a potential deal to lower tariffs. Chinese officials on Thursday denied that trade talks are taking place.

About 25% of the price increases observed by SmartScout were initiated by sellers based in China, said Scott Needham, the company’s CEO. Last week, stainless steel jewelry maker Ursteel hiked prices on four of its products by $6.50, while apparel brand Chouyatou raised the price of some of its dresses by $2. Both businesses are based in China’s Zhejiang province.

Anker, a Chinese electronics brand and one of Amazon’s largest sellers, has raised prices on one-fifth of its products sold in the U.S., including a portable power bank, which went up to $135 from $110, SmartScout data shows.

Representatives from Anker, Ursteel and Chouyatou didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Zulay, headquartered in Florida, is one of many U.S.-based sellers raising prices. The company is also cutting costs. Cordovez said he’s been forced to lay off 19% of his workforce and slash online ad spending by 85%.

Desert Cactus, based in Illinois, is also taking action. Joe Stefani, the company’s president, has been looking to move production of some of his brand’s college-themed merchandise out of China and into Mexico, India and Vietnam. About half of Desert Cactus’ goods come from China, while the rest are made in the U.S., Stefani said.

An Amazon worker moves a cart filled with packages at an Amazon delivery station in Alpharetta, Georgia, on Nov. 28, 2022.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

One of the company’s top products is a customizable license plate frame that’s manufactured in China. At the start of Trump’s first term in 2016, Stefani’s company paid import and shipping fees of 4% on the license plates. That rate has since skyrocketed to 170%, he said.

“The tariffs can’t stay this high,” Stefani said. “There’s so many people that just aren’t going to make it.”

Stefani said he expects Desert Cactus will end up raising prices on some products, though he’s worried shoppers might be put off by sticker shock.

“Will someone be willing to pay $50 for a hat on Amazon?” Stefani said. “You know it’s going to be expensive at the ballpark, but on Amazon we don’t know.”

Dave Dama, co-founder of health and beauty business Pure Daily Care, said the price to manufacture one of his skin-care products in China jumped to $25 from $10. Most Amazon sellers will have no choice but to raise prices, he said.

“If you were selling something for $40 and making a $7 or $8 profit at the end of the day, with these tariffs, those days are gone,” Dama said. “You can’t do that anymore. It’s unsustainable.”

Pure Daily Care plans to stagger price increases over several weeks, and only on products “we absolutely need to,” to keep Amazon’s algorithms from ranking it lower in search results or losing the valuable buy box, he said. The buy box determines which listing pops up first when a shopper clicks on a particular product, and the one that gets purchased when they tap “Add to Cart.”

An Amazon spokesperson said the company’s pricing policies continue to apply.

“As always, sellers set their own prices, and we regularly monitor how we highlight great prices as Featured Offers to provide customers with low prices across a wide selection,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Dama said his company has enough inventory for some products to last up to six months, which it aims to “stretch as long as possible” in the hope that China and the U.S. can reach a trade deal. The company is also forgoing some sales promotions and discounts, while pausing spend on some display and video ads.

Regarding his inventory, Dama said, “We can try to stretch that seven, eight, nine months, which buys us a lot more time for this thing to work out, hopefully.”

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Trump tariffs are raising prices on Amazon and threatening to ruin U.S. sellers who source in China

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