Commonwealth Fusion has raised billion to make energy like the sun and stars — here's a look inside

Commonwealth Fusion has raised $2 billion to make energy like the sun and stars — here’s a look inside

Published

2 years ago

June 9, 2023

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The tokamak room at the Commonwealth Fusion Systems construction site where the tokamak will go that will, company executives tell CNBC, demonstrate net energy, a key milestone in achieving fusion.

Cat Clifford, CNBC

Commonwealth Fusion Systems CEO Bob Mumgaard is a student of the history of technology.

“If you go and you look at what fusion looks like today, you say, ‘Oh this feels kind of like flight in 1918,'” Mumgaard told CNBC in a recent video interview.

In June 1919, two British aviators and war veterans made the first-ever nonstop transatlantic flight, departing from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and landing in County Galway, Ireland. A century later, transatlantic flights are so common, they’re not even noteworthy.

Nuclear fusion is the way stars make energy. A fusion reaction releases more energy than nuclear fission, which is the way nuclear reactors generate power today. Similar to fission, fusion does not release any of the greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. Unlike fission, it also does not generate long-lasting nuclear waste.

For all these reasons, fusion is often called the “Holy Grail” of clean energy.

Research into a device that can replicate and maintain fusion on earth stretches back to the 1950s, but is showing new, if uneven, progress. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab announced in May they were able to momentarily achieve the key fusion milestone known as ignition, where more power is generated from the reaction than goes into the reaction to get it going, but that was a brief flicker. A fusion power plant has been, so far, firmly rooted in the realm of science fiction.

Commonwealth is trying to change that, and has raised more than $2 billion in venture capital from the likes of Bill Gates, Gates’ climate investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Google, John Doerr, Khosla Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures and more. That’s more private capital than any other fusion startup, according to the Fusion Industry Association, the industry’s trade group.

Last week, Commonwealth announced it was one of the eight companies selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to receive a collective $46 million in funding as it achieved certain preestablished milestones.

So why now?

Mumgaard is used to hearing all the reasons why fusion won’t work.

“The skepticism is understandable,” Mumgaard told CNBC. “That doesn’t bother us. We have to build things and show that they work.”

Historically, humans are slow to change their understanding of technological possibility.

“Everyone has different thresholds for what they have to see to believe something,” Mumgaard said. “When the Wright brothers were flying, you still had skeptics that said planes couldn’t exist.”

But Mumgaard also asks for a bit of optimism and curiosity, too. “You don’t have to believe us today. But you at least have to be interested in watching the story and tracking the story. And it’s a race. We’re at the beginning of a race,” Mumgaard told CNBC.

Bob Mumgaard, CEO, Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems

You don’t need to be a nuclear physicist to follow this race. Mumgaard laid out the stages for fusion watchers to look for. First, fusion companies need to make plasma, which is the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid and gas, and is the very fragile condition necessary to maintain a fusion reaction. Then, fusion companies need to make that plasma super hot. Then, that hot plasma has to be confined and protected. In the industry, this trio of conditions — density, temperature and confinement or insulation — is called the “triple product.”

Once fusion companies get that triple product, they then are going to start reaching ignition, after which they will generate an abundance of clean, waste-free energy.

Or so that’s the plan. Right now, that race is “accelerating,” Mumgaard says. “You’re seeing more entrants; you’re seeing entrants get faster and pull away.”

Demand for clean energy, advancements in science and development in the technology of the component parts necessary to make a fusion device are all coming together right now to make this moment the tipping point in the race for fusion, Mumgaard says.

The first factor is the increasingly urgent demand for new sources of energy that do not contribute to climate change.

The Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus is headquartered in Devens, Massachusetts, which is between 35 miles and 40 miles outside of downtown Boston.

Cat Clifford, CNBC

Top climate scientists at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said that to have “no or limited” overshoot of the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming above pre-industrial levels will require hitting net-zero around 2050. Knowing the world needs to go to net-zero global emissions by 2050 is akin to being in the analog age and knowing precisely when the Internet Revolution was going to begin, Mumgaard says.

“The energy transition is the largest market transition in human history,” Mumgaard told CNBC. That’s more than generating electricity. “How we generate power, how we make our chemicals, how we do our steel, how we do our cement — you are taking all of that and you are rebuilding it without carbon.”

Wind and solar energy are already being deployed at scale, but fusion can serve to replace large, baseload energy demands such as powering steel and cement manufacturing, industrial furnaces and urban centers. “That’s a missing hole,” Mumgaard told CNBC. “And it gets more and more acute as you get deeper and deeper into the transition.”

Nuclear fission could be that kind of baseload energy, but as Germany has very recently demonstrated, some populations are against fission because of the waste and risk of nuclear accidents similar to those at Chernobyl and Fukushima.

“We don’t want to limit our options to either force something that people don’t want, or to hope that we convince people of something that they’re dead set against,” Mumgaard told CNBC.

In addition to increased demand, a set of scientific and technological advances are also pushing fusion forward.

“We’ve constantly actually gotten better and better at fusion, even though from the outside, we haven’t passed a big milestone by making a fusion power plant,” Mumgaard told CNBC. “We’ve just accumulated a huge amount of science the same way like we accumulate a huge amount of science about gene sequence, about the genome.”

Large supercomputers are good enough now to simulate what is happening inside fusion devices, and technological developments such as machine learning and fast actuators are being applied to making fusion devices in new ways.

Most critically for Commonwealth, the capacity to build ultrastrong magnets is better now than it ever has been before.

Commonwealth uses those magnets to hold the plasma in place, and five years ago they didn’t exist, Mumgaard told CNBC, because the material used to make them didn’t exist at the quantities necessary.

The advanced manufacturing facility located at the Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Massachusetts, where magnets are manufactured.

Photo courtesy Commonwealth Fusion Systems

That material is a high-temperature superconducting tape. The breakthrough of making high-temperature superconducting material was achieved in the 1980s, and won two physicists the Nobel Prize in 1987 for their discovery. But it took a long time and lots of science before that material could be made outside a lab, Mumgaard says.

What it looks like to spend $2 billion to build a fusion machine

In the race to deliver fusion, Commonwealth is a front-runner.

“Since their founding only five years ago, the growth at Commonwealth Fusion Systems has been groundbreaking. Their growth is not based on speculation or idle promises, but on results,” Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, a trade group, told CNBC. “Their leadership role in helping organize the fusion industry has lifted the whole industry toward a vision for commercialization on an aggressive timeline.”

At Commonwealth’s 50-acre headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts, about 40 miles from Boston, chief scientific officer Brandon Sorbom told CNBC the company has a significant procurement team managing the supply chain necessary to build a tokamak, the donut-shaped fusion device at the heart of the company’s system, in addition to an extensive team manufacturing parts on site.

The SPARC facility under construction at the Commonwealth Fusion Systems campus in Devens, Massachusetts.

Cat Clifford, CNBC

Right now, Commonwealth is focused on building its tokamak, called SPARC, with a goal of turning it on in 2025. It will shortly thereafter demonstrate net energy gain, Sorbom told CNBC.

After building SPARC, Commonwealth’s next goal is to build ARC, a more mature version of its fusion device that will deliver electricity to the grid, Sorbom told CNBC. ARC is scheduled to be completed in the early 2030s and will collect the heat generated by the fusion reaction in molten salt and use that heat to turn a turbine generator to make electricity, Sorbom added.

A rendering of the SPARC device Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building to demonstrate net energy.

Cat Clifford, CNBC

Early on, Commonwealth will develop and be partial owner of fusion power plants, Ally Yost, chief of staff, told CNBC, and will make money as other power generators do: by selling electricity.

But eventually, Commonwealth will operate more like Boeing does for the airline industry.

“They are the designers and owners of the IP around the designs of the planes. They are manufacturers of key components.” Commonwealth may also have a service component of its business and customers will likely be utilities, industrial companies or energy-hungry tech companies, Yost told CNBC.

Reporter Cat Clifford in the Commonwealth Fusion Systems tokamak room where the SPARC facility will demonstrate net energy.

Cat Clifford, CNBC

But right now, the focus is getting the demonstration plant, SPARC, turned on.

The facility that will house SPARC has five prongs, and at the center is the room that houses the tokamak, Alex Creely, the head of tokamak operations, told CNBC during a tour of the facility. It will be 25 feet tall and about 25 feet in diameter, and the ARC tokamak is going to be roughly twice as big.

The Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ SPARC facility under construction in Devens, Massachusetts.

Cat Clifford, CNBC

Even though Commonwealth is still only building its first demonstration reactor, Mumgaard sees the dawning of the fusion age as inevitable.

“To know that it is not just scientifically feasible, but industrially feasible and commercially feasible, and that there is momentum to turn that into a product and take that heat and turn it into electricity, that is a big deal,” Mumgaard told CNBC. “Once you know you have that option, how does it change that bigger story on climate?”

The UK and Germany have very different ideas about the future of nuclear energy

Technology

Easy returns cause big trouble for Amazon sellers, but return rates show signs of slowing

Published

1 day ago

June 21, 2025

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Easy returns cause big trouble for Amazon sellers, but return rates show signs of slowing

Returns on Amazon are free and easy for shoppers, but they’re risky and expensive for the small businesses that sell a majority of the goods on the world’s biggest e-commerce site. Returns have driven some sellers to exit the popular Fulfillment by Amazon program, while others told CNBC they’d like to leave the platform altogether.

At the heart of the problem is a big rise in returns fraud, which has led to customers mistakenly receiving used products when they ordered something new. In two particularly egregious examples involving baby products described to CNBC, Amazon sent customers used diapers and a chiller with someone else’s rotten breastmilk inside.

“I really don’t think that consumers understand how many small businesses are on Amazon and how their return habits affect small businesses and families like mine,” said Rachelle Baron, owner of Beau and Belle Littles, which sells reusable swim diapers on Amazon.

Baron said her business tanked after a return incident with Amazon. The e-commerce platform shipped soiled swim diapers to customers after the used baby products had been returned to Amazon, Baron said.

“There was actually two diapers that were sent out that were poopy,” she said.

In 2024, nearly 14% of all U.S. retail returns were fraudulent, up from 5% in 2018, according to a report by the National Retail Federation. In total, the report found that returns cost retailers $890 billion in 2024.

Amazon started charging sellers in its fulfillment program (FBA) a new fee in June 2024 for items that exceed certain return rate thresholds. Sellers who sign up for FBA rely on Amazon for logistics, including shipping, packing and returns.

In September, a couple months after the fee went into effect, e-commerce group Helium 10 saw return rates for U.S. Amazon sellers drop nearly 5%.

“It’s forcing the seller to have higher quality listings and higher quality products,” said Helium 10 General Manager Zoe Lu.

Amazon has also started adding a warning label to some “frequently returned items,” which could be contributing to the dip.

Rising prices

However, the new fee may also be leading to rising prices.

One survey by e-commerce analysis company SmartScout found that 65% of sellers said they raised prices in 2024 directly because of Amazon fee changes. Other sellers told CNBC returns fraud is the reason they’ve raised prices.

In total, CNBC talked to seven Amazon sellers to find out how they’re handling the rising cost of returns.

“We’re running at about just over 1% net profit on Amazon, totally due to fraud and return abuse,” said Lorie Corlett, who sells Sterling Spectrum protective cases for hot wheels. She said her return rate is 4% on Amazon and only 1% on other marketplaces like Walmart. “It’s really Amazon that’s accountable at the end of the day. People would stop doing it if Amazon held them accountable.”

Amazon told CNBC it has no tolerance for fraudulent returns and that it takes action against some scammers. Those measures include denying refunds and requiring customer identity verification.

Mike Jelliff sells professional music gear through his GeekStands brand on Amazon and eight other marketplaces. He said his return rate on Amazon is three times higher than the average he sees elsewhere.

“On eBay, we’re allowed to block specific customers out,” Jelliff said. “But on Amazon, that customer is still allowed to repurchase from us.”

Jelliff showed CNBC the system of about 40 cameras he’s installed in his Tyler, Texas, warehouse to track every outgoing item, incoming return and unboxing. He uses the images when filing appeals with Amazon, including when customers request refunds claiming they never receive an item. He keeps a blacklist of repeat offenders who commit this kind of fraud and those who return used and damaged items, which become a total loss for him.

Amazon has made some improvements to its returns process, said Jelliff, who doesn’t rely on FBA. This includes Amazon allowing small businesses to make multiple appeals when fighting a fraudulent return. Amazon has also let Jelliff opt-out of automatic return labels for items above $100 starting in 2023, and his return rate has been dropping since.

Mike Jelliff at his GeekStands warehouse in Tyler, Texas, on June 6, 2025. Jelliff sees three times more returns of his professional music gear on Amazon, compared to the average on other marketplaces like eBay and Walmart.

Jacob Schatz

Why returns are destroyed

Figuring out which returns are fraudulent and which are ready for re-sale is labor-intensive and item specific, experts said. That creates plenty of room for error.

“Because it’s such a large operation, things are missed,” said Lu of Helium 10. “I think they’re probably missed on the margins, but these stories are very impactful because it is such a reckoning for the brand.”

Ceres Chill founder Lisa Myers, who once relied on Amazon to handle returns for her business as part of FBA, has one of these stories.

In 2023, Amazon sent one of Ceres Chill’s products to a customer with someone else’s rotten breastmilk inside, said Myers, adding that the customer wrote a review saying, “she will never forget that smell.”

“To have something, and I don’t mean to be dramatic, but dangerous, somebody else’s bodily fluids in your kitchen rotting in something that you had intended to use for your child is unacceptable,” Myers said. “That’s the moment I broke down crying and just sat down and thought, I have no idea how this could have happened.”

Myers said she left FBA after the incident, leaving behind benefits like having her products labeled with Amazon’s Prime badge.

“It hurts our business to not participate in Fulfilled by Amazon,” Myers said. “It’s just we’re not willing to, we will never put profit over the safety and, frankly, mental health of our customers.”

Instead, Myers outsources all her returns to baby resell specialist Goodbuy Gear, which is on track to re-sell 200,000 returned baby products this year.

Re-selling responsibly

Kristin Langenfeld started GoodBuy Gear when she was a new mom struggling to find a good quality, used jogging stroller.

“We’ve spent the last nine years building out a database that has all of the products and the variations, the common issues, the recalls,” Langenfeld said. “For some of these, there’s 40 points that we inspect on the item itself, and it’s really complicated.”

Langenfeld showed CNBC the process at her warehouse in Malvern, Pennsylvania, where each item is inspected for about 15 minutes and is typically handled by at least four employees. The resource intensive process is paying off. She says 33 new sellers signed up in 2024, three times more than the previous year. And with business growing 50% year-over-year, she’s upgrading to a bigger warehouse in Columbus, Ohio.

She was inspired to handle returns after visiting a major retailer’s returns warehouse five years ago.

“Taped on the floor were signs that said ‘incinerate,’ ‘destroy,'” she said.

Returns generated an estimated 29 million metric tons of carbon emissions in 2024, and 9.8 billion pounds of returns ended up in landfills, according to reverse logistics software provider Optoro.

Amazon has faced criticism for destroying millions of pounds of unused products. In 2022, Amazon told CNBC it was “working towards a goal of zero product disposal,” but wouldn’t give a timeline for that ambition. Three years later, that goal is still in the works, with Amazon telling CNBC in a statement, “The vast majority of returns are resold as new or used, returned to selling partners, liquidated, or donated.”

In 2020, Amazon added two new options for sellers to re-home returns. “Grade and Resell” allows all U.S. FBA sellers to have Amazon rate the return and mark it as “used” before re-selling it. FBA Liquidation allows sellers to recoup some losses by offloading palettes of goods for re-sale on the secondary market through liquidation partners like Liquidity Services.

There’s also an FBA Donations program that’s been around since 2019, allowing sellers to automatically offer eligible overstock and returns to charity groups through the non-profit Good360. Amazon told CNBC these seller programs give a second life to more than 300 million items a year.

For shoppers wanting to keep returns from incineration or landfills, Amazon also has options.

Amazon Resale has used and open-box goods, Amazon Renewed sells refurbished items and Amazon Outlet sells overstock. Daily deal site Woot!, bought by Amazon for $110 million in 2010, also sells scratched and dented items. Customers can also trade in certain electronics, like Amazon devices, phones and tablets, for Amazon gift cards or send them to the company’s certified recycler.

“I hope the change that we’re able to make as a country is that we stop making crap,” Langenfeld said. “We should make high quality products that are meant for resale.”

Technology

Meta approached Perplexity before massive Scale AI deal

Published

2 days ago

June 20, 2025

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Meta approached Perplexity before massive Scale AI deal

Meta approached artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI about a potential takeover bid before ultimately investing $14.3 billion into Scale AI, CNBC confirmed on Friday.

The two companies did not finalize a deal, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.

One person familiar with the talks said it was “mutually dissolved,” while another person familiar with the matter said Perplexity walked away from a potential deal.

Bloomberg earlier reported the talks between Meta and Perplexity. Perplexity declined to comment. Meta did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Meta’s attempt to purchase Perplexity serves as the latest example of Mark Zuckerberg‘s aggressive push to bolster his company’s AI efforts amid fierce competition from OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet. Zuckerberg has grown agitated that rivals like OpenAI appear to be ahead in both underlying AI models and consumer-facing apps, and he is going to extreme lengths to hire top AI talent, as CNBC has previously reported.

Why ether ETF inflows have come roaring back from the dead

Published

2 days ago

June 20, 2025

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Why ether ETF inflows have come roaring back from the dead

Omar Marques | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Ether ETFs have finally come to life this year after some started to fear they may be becoming zombie funds.

Collectively, the funds tracking the price of spot ether are on pace for their sixth consecutive week of inflows and eight positive week in the last nine, according to SoSoValue.

The second largest cryptocurrency has become more attractive to institutions in recent weeks largely due to recent regulatory momentum in the U.S. around stablecoins – many of which run on the Ethereum network – the successful IPO of Circle, the issuer of the second-largest stablecoin; and new leadership at the Ethereum Foundation.

“What we’re seeing is institutional recalibration,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto charting and research platform DYOR. “After the initial ETH ETF approval fizzled without a price pop, smart money started quietly building positions. They’re betting not on price momentum but on positioning ahead of utility unlocks like staking access, options listings, and eventually inflows from retirement platforms.”

The first year of ether ETFs, which launched in July 2024, has been characterized by weak demand. While the funds have had spikes in inflows, they’ve trailed far behind bitcoin ETFs in both inflows and investor attention – amassing about $3.9 billion in net inflows since listing versus bitcoin ETFs’ $36 billion in their first year of trading.

“With increasing acceptance of crypto on Wall Street, especially now as a means for payments and remittances, investors are being drawn to ETH ETFs,” said Chris Rhine, head of liquid active strategies at Galaxy Digital.

Additionally, he added, the CME basis on ether – or the price difference between ether futures and the spot price – is higher than that of bitcoin, giving arbitrageurs an opportunity to profit by going long on ether ETFs while shorting futures (a common trading strategy) and contributing to the uptrend in ether ETF inflows.

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Ether (ETH) 1 month

Despite the uptrend in inflows, the price of ether itself is negative for this month and flat over the past month.

For the year, it’s down 25% as it’s been suffering from an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about Ethereum’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year has not helped.

In March, Standard Chartered slashed its ether price target by more than half. However, the firm also said the coin could still see a turnaround this year.

Since last week’s big spike in inflows, they’ve “slowed but stayed net positive, suggesting conviction, not hype,” Kurland said. “The market looks like a heart monitor, but the buyers are treating it like a long-term infrastructure bet.”