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.
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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 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.
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.
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“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.
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.”
United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the first two demonstration satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation stands ready for launch on pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on October 5, 2023 in Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States.
Paul Hennessey | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Amazon delayed the launch of its Kuiper internet satellites due to poor weather conditions on Wednesday night.
A United Launch Alliance rocket carrying 27 Kuiper satellites was set to lift off from a launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, but ULA said it couldn’t continue countdown operations as “stubborn cumulus clouds” and heavy winds pushed the launch outside its planned window, according to a livestream.
“Weather is observed and forecast NO GO for liftoff within the remaining launch window at Cape Canaveral this evening,” ULA said. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
Six years ago Amazon unveiled its plans to build a constellation of internet satellites in low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of Earth’s surface. The company aims to sell high-speed, low-latency internet to consumers, corporations and governments, offering connections through square-shaped terminals. Commercial service is expected to come online later this year.
Amazon is racing to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, the dominant player in the market, with 8,000 satellites already up in the air. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk now has a central role in the White House as one of President Donald Trump’s top advisors, overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Since Musk took on the role, Starlink’s footprint has increased within the federal government.
The clock is ticking for Amazon to meet a deadline set by the Federal Communications Commission, which requires the company to have half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, up in the air by July 2026.
Once it completes its first launch, Amazon expects to ramp up its production, processing and deployment rates. It’s begun prepping satellites for its next mission, which will also hitch a ride on one of ULA’s Atlas V rockets.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai meets with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Warsaw, Poland, on February 13, 2025.
Klaudia Radecka | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Google has reversed a policy forbidding employees from discussing its antitrust woes following a settlement with workers.
The company sent a notice to U.S. employees last week saying it rescinded “the rule requesting that workers refrain from commenting internally or externally about the on-going antitrust lawsuit filed against Google by the U.S. Department of Justice,” according to correspondence viewed by CNBC.
Google settled with the Alphabet Workers Union, which represents company employees and contractors, according to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB. The settlement and policy reversal mark a major victory for Google staffers, who have seen increased censorship on subjects such as politics, litigation and defense contracts by the search giant since 2019.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in 2020, alleging that the company has kept its share of the general search market by creating strong barriers to entry and a feedback loop that sustained its dominance.
Google said it “will not announce or maintain overbroad rules or policies that restrict your right to comment, internally or externally, about whether and/or how the on-going antitrust lawsuit filed against Google by the U.S. Department of Justice may impact your terms and conditions of employment,” according to last week’s notice.
The reversal comes as Google and the DOJ prepare to return to the courtroom for their scheduled remedies trial on April 21. The DOJ has said it is considering structural remedies, including breaking up Google’s Chrome web browser, which it argues gives Google an unfair advantage in the search market.
A U.S. District Court judge ruled in August that Google illegally held a monopoly in the search market. Google said it would appeal the decision. The DOJ doubled down on its calls for a breakup in a March filing.
Following the August ruling, Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, sent a companywide email directing employees to “refrain from commenting on this case, both internally and externally.”
Shortly after, the Alphabet Workers Union filed an unfair labor practice charge against Google with the NLRB. The union alleged that Walker’s message was an “overly broad directive” and said that a breakup could impact workers’ roles. The NLRB in March ruled that Google must allow workers to speak on such topics.
Google’s settlement states that the National Labor Relations Act gives employees the right to form, join or assist a union. It notes that Google is not rescinding its prior clarification that states employees may not speak on behalf of Google on this matter without approval from the company. The settlement also adds that Google will not interfere with, restrain or coerce workers in the exercise of their rights.
Despite the settlement, spokesperson Courtenay Mencini said Google did not agree with the NLRB’s ruling.
“To avoid lengthy litigation, we agreed to remind employees that they have the right to talk about their employment, as they’ve always been free to and regularly do,” Mencini said in a statement to CNBC.
The settlement by Google comes at a “crucial moment” ahead of the remedies trial, the Alphabet Worker’s Union said Monday.
“We think the potential remedies from this trial could have impact on our wages, working conditions and terms of employment,” said Stephen McMurtry, communications chair of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA, told CNBC.
Apple CEO Tim Cook inspects the new iPhone 16 during an Apple special event at Apple headquarters on September 09, 2024 in Cupertino, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Apple shares skyrocketed 15% on Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a 90-day pause on his administration’s “reciprocal tariffs,” which would have affected the company’s production locations in Vietnam, India, and Thailand.
The rally added over $400 billion to Apple’s market cap, which now stands just under $3 trillion. It was Apple’s best day since January 1998, when late founder Steve Jobs was the interim CEO and three years before the company unveiled the first iPod. At the time, Apple’s market cap was close to $3 billion.
Apple has been the most prominent name to get whacked by Trump’s tariffs. Before Wednesday, it was on its worst four-day trading stretch since 2000. Investors worried about Apple’s outlook because the company still makes the majority of its revenue from selling physical devices, which need to be imported into the U.S.
Most of Apple’s iPhones and other hardware products are still made in China, which was not exempted from tariffs on Wednesday. In fact, Trump increased tariffs on China to 125% on Wednesday, up from 54%.
China issued an 84% tariff on U.S. goods this week, raising the possibility that Apple could get caught up in a trade war and lose ground in China, its third-largest market by sales.
Apple has worked to diversify its supply chain to lessen reliance on China in recent years.
On Wednesday, tariffs on Vietnam were reduced from 46% to 10%, and tariffs on India were cut 26% to 10%, which raises the possibility that Apple will be able to serve a large percentage of its U.S. customers from factories outside of China with lower tariffs.
Stocks skyrocketed across the board on Wednesday after Trump announced the tariff pause. The Nasdaq Composite climbed over 12%, its second-best day ever.
Apple hasn’t commented publicly on Trump’s tariffs, but CEO Tim Cook will likely address the topic on an earnings call on May 1.