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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

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Buy now, pay later lender Klarna files for U.S. IPO

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Buy now, pay later lender Klarna files for U.S. IPO

Pedestrians walk by an advertisement for Klarna.

Daniel Harvey Gonzalez | In Pictures via Getty Images

Klarna, a provider of buy now, pay later loans filed its IPO prospectus on Friday, and plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol KLAR.

Klarna, headquartered in Sweden, hasn’t yet disclosed the number of shares to be offered or the expected price range.

The decision to go public in the U.S. deals a significant blow to European stock exchanges, which have struggled to retain homegrown tech firms. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski had hinted for years that a U.S. listing was more likely, citing better visibility and regulatory advantages.

Klarna is continuing to rebuild after a dramatic downturn. Once a pandemic-era darling valued at $46 billion in a SoftBank-led funding round, Klarna saw its valuation slashed by 85% in 2022, plummeting to $6.7 billion in its most recent primary fundraising. However, analysts now estimate the company’s valuation in the $15 billion range, bolstered by its return to profitability in 2023.

Revenue last year increased 24% to $2.8 billion. The company’s operating loss was $121 million for the year, and adjusted operating profit was $181 million, swinging from a loss of $49 million a year earlier.

Founded in 2005, Klarna is best known for its buy now, pay later model, a service that allows consumers to split purchases into installments. The company competes with Affirm, which went public in 2021, and Afterpay, which Block acquired for $29 billion in early 2022. Klarna’s major shareholders include venture firms Sequoia Capital and Atomico, as well as SoftBank’s Vision Fund.

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Shares of DocuSign surge 14% on strong earnings, AI boost

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Shares of DocuSign surge 14% on strong earnings, AI boost

DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen on Q4 results, launch of DocuSign IAM and growth outlook

Docusign rose more than 14% after reporting stronger-than-expected earnings after the bell Thursday.

“We’ve really stabilized and I think started to turn the corner on the core business,” CEO Allan Thygesen said Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “We’ve become much more efficient.”

Here’s how the company performed in the fourth quarter FY2025 compared to LSEG estimates:

  • Earnings per share: 86 cents vs. 85 cents expected
  • Revenue: $776 million vs. $761 million

The earnings beat was boosted in part by the electronic signature service’s new artificial intelligence-enabled content called Docusign IAM, a platform for optimizing processes involving agreements.

“It’s tremendously valuable,” Thygesen said. “It’s opening a treasure trove of data. … We’re seeing excellent pickup.”

Looking to fiscal year 2026, Thygesen said Docusign expects IAM to account for low double digits of the total growth of the business by Q4.

Read more CNBC tech news

Thygesen said the company is also partnering with Microsoft and Google, which the company does not view as competitors because they’re “not looking to become agreement management specialists.”

Despite consumer sentiment and demand dipping across the board due to tariff uncertainty, Thygesen said the company has not seen anything yet in its transactional activity to indicate a slowdown in demand or growth.

“More and more people are going to want to sign things electronically,” Thygesen said.

The company reported subscription revenue at $757 million, marking a 9% year-over-year increase. Docusign said it expects first-quarter revenue between $745 million and $749 million and projects full-year revenue between $3.129 billion and $3.141 billion.

Docusign reported net income of $83.50 million, or 39 cents per share, compared to net income of $27.24 million, or 13 cents per share, a year ago. Fourth-quarter revenue of $776 million was up 9% from the year-ago quarter.

DocuSign went public in 2018 at a $6 billion valuation. The company’s share price soared during the pandemic as demand for remote services boomed during lockdowns and social restrictions, hitting record highs in 2021 before plummeting. Thygesen, who previously worked at Google, joined the company in September 2022 after DocuSign’s massive slide.

The stock is down more than 16% year-to-date.

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Tech’s 3-week sell-off, led by Tesla, wipes out $2.7 trillion in value from megacaps

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Tech's 3-week sell-off, led by Tesla, wipes out .7 trillion in value from megacaps

Less than two months ago, the tech industry’s top leaders flocked to Washington, D.C., for the presidential inauguration, part of an effort to strike a friendly tone with President Donald Trump after a contentious first go-round in the White House.

Thus far, they’ve avoided any nasty social media posts from the president. But their treatment by investors has been anything but warm.

Over the last three weeks, since the Nasdaq touched its high for the year, the seven most valuable U.S. tech companies — often called “the Magnificent Seven” — have lost a combined $2.7 trillion in market value. The sell-off has pushed the Nasdaq to its lowest level since September.

As of Thursday, the tech-heavy index was down 4.9% for the week, heading for its worst weekly performance in six months. If it ends up down more than 5.8%, it would be the steepest weekly drop since January 2022.

Sparking the downdraft was President Trump’s promise to slap high tariffs on top trading partners, including China, Mexico and Canada, along with mass firings of government workers. The combination of a potential trade war and rising unemployment is particularly troubling news for consumer and business spending and has raised fears of a recession.

Additionally, many technology companies import key parts from abroad, and rely on trade partners for manufacturing.

This isn’t what Wall Street was expecting.

Following Trump’s election victory in November, the market jumped on prospects of diminished regulation and favorable tax policies. The Nasdaq climbed to a record close on Dec. 16, capping a more than 9% rally over about six weeks after the election.

Since then, electric car maker Tesla has lost close to half its value, despite — or perhaps because of — the central role that CEO Elon Musk is playing in the Trump administration.

The Nasdaq’s high point for the year came on Feb. 19, about a month into Trump’s second term. But it finished that week lower and has continued its precipitous decline.

Here’s how the seven megacaps have fared over that stretch:

Apple, the world’s most valuable company and the only remaining member of the $3 trillion club, has lost $529 billion in market cap since the close on Feb. 19. The iPhone maker is down 17%.

Microsoft, which was previously worth over $3 trillion, has fallen by $267 billion in the past three weeks, a drop of close to 9% for the software giant.

Nvidia, the chipmaker that’s been the biggest beneficiary of the artificial intelligence boom, also slid below $3 trillion over the course of losing $577 billion in value, the biggest dollar decline in the group. Like Apple, the stock is down 17% since the Nasdaq peaked.

Amazon is down by $347 billion, falling by 14%, while Alphabet is off by $275 billion after a 12% decline. Meta has shed $286 billion in market cap, a 16% drop.

Tesla has seen by far the biggest percentage decline at 33%, equaling $386 billion in value.

Goldman Sachs on Wednesday referred to the group as the “Maleficent 7.” Chief U.S. equity strategist David Kostin noted that the basket now trades at its lowest valuation premium relative to the S&P 500 since 2017. Goldman cut its price target on the benchmark index to 6,200 from 6,500. The S&P 500 closed on Thursday at 5,521.52.

“We believe investors will require either a catalyst that improves the economic growth outlook or clear asymmetry to the upside before they try to ‘catch the falling knife’ and reverse the recent market momentum,” Kostin wrote.

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