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China and the U.S. are in a race to create the first grid-scale nuclear fusion energy. After decades of U.S. leadership, China is catching up by spending twice as much and building projects at record speed.

Often called the holy grail of clean energy, nuclear fusion creates four times more energy per kilogram of fuel than traditional nuclear fission and four million times more than burning coal, with no greenhouse gasses or long-term radioactive waste. If all goes to plan, it will be at least a $1 trillion market by 2050, according to Ignition Research.

There’s just one big problem. 

“The only working fusion power plants right now in the universe are stars,” said Dennis Whyte, professor of nuclear science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The U.S. was first to large-scale use of fusion with a hydrogen bomb test in 1952. In the seven decades since, scientists around the world have been struggling to harness fusion reactions for power generation.

Fusion reactions occur when hydrogen atoms reach extreme enough temperatures that they fuse together, forming a super-heated gas called plasma. The mass shed during the process can, in theory, be turned into huge amounts of energy, but the plasma is hard to control. One popular method uses powerful magnets to suspend and control the plasma inside a tokamak, which is a metal donut-shaped device. Another uses high-energy lasers, pointed at a peppercorn-sized pellet of fuel, rapidly compressing and imploding it. 

That’s how the U.S. pulled off the historic first fusion ignition, producing net positive energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility, or NIF, in 2022.

Here, the preamplifier module increases the laser energy as it heads toward the target chamber at the National Ignition Facitility.

Photo courtesy Damien Jemison at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Since then, private investment in U.S. fusion startups has soared to more than $8 billion, up from $1.2 billion in 2021, according to the Fusion Industry Association. Of the FIA’s 40 member companies, 25 of them are based in the U.S.

Traditional nuclear power, created from fission instead of fusion, has seen a big uptick in investment as Big Tech looks for ways to fill the ever-increasing power needs of AI data centers. Amazon, Google and Meta have signed a pledge to help triple nuclear energy worldwide by 2050. 

“If you care about AI, if you care about energy leadership … you have to make investments into fusion,” FIA CEO Andrew Holland said. “This is something that if the United States doesn’t lead on, then China will.”

Money, size and speed

While the U.S. has the most active nuclear power plants, China is king of new projects

Despite breaking ground on its first reactor nearly four decades after the U.S. pioneered the tech, China’s now building far more fission power plants than any other country.

China entered the fusion race in the early 2000s, about 50 years after the U.S., when it joined more than 30 nations to collaborate on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor fusion megaproject in France. But ITER has since hit major delays.

The race is on between individual nations, but the U.S. private sector remains in the lead. Of the $8 billion in global private fusion investment, $6 billion is in the U.S., according to the FIA.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup born out of MIT, has raised the most money, nearly $2 billion from the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Google. 

Washington-based Helion has raised $1 billion from investors like Open AI’s Sam Altman and a highly ambitious deal with Microsoft to deliver fusion power to the grid by 2028. Google-backed TAE Technologies has raised $1.2 billion.

“Whoever has essentially abundant limitless energy … can impact everything you think of,” said Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE Technologies. “That is a scary thought if that’s in the wrong hands.” 

When it comes to public funding, China is way ahead. 

Beijing is putting a reported $1.5 billion annually toward the effort while U.S. federal dollars for fusion have averaged about $800 million annually the last few years, according to the Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences.

President Donald Trump ramped up support for nuclear, including fusion, during his first term, and that continued under former President Joe Biden. It’s unclear what fusion funding will look like in Trump’s second term, amid massive federal downsizing

U.S. senators and fusion experts published a report in February calling for $10 billion of federal funds to help keep the U.S. from losing its lead. 

But the U.S. may already have lost the lead when it comes to reactor size. Generally, the bigger the footprint, the more efficiently a reactor can heat and confine the plasma, increasing the chances for net positive energy.

A satellite image from January 11, 2025, shows a massive nuclear project in Mianyang, China, that appears to include four laser bays pointing at a containment dome roughly the size of a football field, about twice as big as the U.S. National Ignition Fusion Facility.

Planet Labs PBC

A series of satellite images provided to CNBC by Planet Labs shows the rapid building in 2024 of a giant new laser-fusion site in China. The containment dome where the fusion reaction will occur is roughly twice the size of NIF, the U.S. laser-fusion project, CNA Corporation’s Decker Eveleth said. The China site is likely a fusion-fission hybrid, FIA’s Holland said. 

“A fusion-fission hybrid essentially is like replicating a bomb, but as a power plant. It would never work, never fly in a place like the United States, where you have a regulatory regime that determines safety,” Holland said. “But in a regime like China, where it doesn’t matter what the people who live next door say, if the government says we want to do it, we’re going to do it.”

China’s existing national tokamak project, EAST, has been setting records, volleying with France’s project WEST in the last couple months for the longest ever containment of plasma inside a reactor, although that’s a less monumental milestone than net positive energy.

Another huge state-funded Chinese project, CRAFT, is set to reach completion this year. The $700 million 100-acre fusion campus in eastern China will also have a new tokamak called BEST that is expected to be finished in 2027.

China’s CRAFT appears to follow a U.S. plan published by hundreds of scientists in 2020, Holland said. 

“Congress has not done anything to spend the money to put this into action,” he said. “We published this thing, and the Chinese then went and built it.”

U.S. fusion startup Helion told CNBC some Chinese projects are copying its patented designs, too.

“China, specifically, we’re seeing investment from the state agencies to invest in companies to then replicate U.S. companies’ designs,” said David Kirtley, founder and CEO of Helion.

Manpower and materials

China’s rapid rollout of new fusion projects comes at a time when American efforts have largely been focused on upgrading existing machines, some of them more than 30 years old.

“Nobody wants to work on old dinosaurs, ” said TAE’s Binderbauer, adding that new projects attract more talent. “There’s a bit of a brain drain.”

In the early 2000s, budget cuts to domestic fusion research forced U.S. universities to halt work on new machines and send researchers to learn on other country’s machines, including China’s.

“Instead of building new ones, we went to China and helped them build theirs, thinking, ‘Oh, that’d be great. They’ll have the facility. We’ll be really smart,'” said Bob Mumgaard, co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. “Well, that was a big mistake.” 

China now has more fusion patents than any other country, and 10 times the number of doctorates in fusion science and engineering as the U.S., according to a report from Nikkei Asia.

“There’s a finite labor pool in the West that all the companies compete for,” Binderbauer said. “That is a fundamental constraint.”

Commonwealth Fusion Systems SPARC tokamak being assembled in December 2024 in Devens, Massachusetts, is scheduled to use superconducting magnets to reach fusion ignition in 2027.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Besides manpower, fusion projects need a huge amount of materials, such as high power magnets, specific metals, capacitors and power semiconductors. Helion’s Kirtley said the timeline of the company’s latest prototype, Polaris, was set entirely by the availability of semiconductors.

China is making moves to corner the supply chain for many of these materials, in a similar play to how it came to dominate solar and EV batteries.

“China is investing ten times the rate that the United States is in advanced material development,” Kirtley said. “That’s something we have got to change.”

Shanghai-based fusion company Energy Singularity told CNBC in a statement that it “undoubtedly” benefits from China’s “efficient supply chain.” In June, Energy Singularity said it successfully created plasma in record time, just two years after beginning the design of its tokamak.

That’s still a far cry from reaching grid-scale, commercial fusion power. Helion aims to be first with a goal of 2028. Commonwealth has announced the site in Virginia where it plans to bring the first fusion power plant, ARC, online in the early 2030s.

“Even though the first ones might be in the U.S., I don’t think we should take comfort in that,” said MIT’s Whyte. “The finish line is actually a mature fusion industry that’s producing products for use around the world, including in AI centers.”

Watch: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/03/14/china-is-catching-the-us-in-nuclear-fusion-amid-ai-power-demand.html

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Software startup Rippling sues competitor Deel, claiming a spy carried out ‘corporate espionage’

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Software startup Rippling sues competitor Deel, claiming a spy carried out 'corporate espionage'

Co-founder & CEO of Rippling Parker Conrad speaks onstage during the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Oct. 20, 2022

Kimberly White | TechCrunc | Getty Images

Human resources software startup Rippling sued competitor Deel in federal district court on Monday, claiming that “Deel cultivated a spy” to orchestrate a trade-secret theft.

The employee met with Deel executives and passed internal Rippling records to a reporter, according to San Francisco-based Rippling’s complaint in the U.S. District Court for California’s Northern District.

Rippling claimed in the filing Deel violated the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and misappropriated trade secrets.

The two startups are among the most world’s most valuable. Investors valued Rippling at $13.5 billion in a funding round announced last year, while Deel told media outlets in 2023 that it was worth $12 billion. Deel ranked No. 28 on CNBC’s 2024 Disruptor 50 list.

“Weeks after Rippling is accused of violating sanctions law in Russia and seeding falsehoods about Deel, Rippling is trying to shift the narrative with these sensationalized claims,” a Deel spokesperson told CNBC in an email. “We deny all legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims.”

Rippling confirmed its findings earlier this month. The company’s general counsel sent a letter to three Deel executives that referred to a new Slack channel, and the Deel spy quickly looked for it. Rippling subsequently served a court order to the spy at its office in Dublin, Ireland requiring him to preserve information on his mobile phone.

“Deel’s spy lied to the court-appointed solicitor about the location of his phone, and then locked himself in a bathroom — seemingly in order to delete evidence from his phone — all while the independent solicitor repeatedly warned him not to delete materials from his device and that his non-compliance was breaching a court order with penal endorsement,” Rippling said in Monday’s filing. “The spy responded: ‘I’m willing to take that risk.’ He then fled the premises.”

Rippling hired the person whom it calls the Deel spy for a management role in 2023, as the two companies were becoming more competitive, the filing says. Deel had used Rippling’s software, but Rippling opted to not renew Deel’s contract, according to the legal filing.

The spy repeatedly accessed information about Rippling customers, quotes, sales calls, demos and support requests in internal Slack repositories, according to the filing. He found and downloaded Rippling’s guidance on how to go up against Deel for prospective business, too, the filing says.

Then, in February, a reporter at The Information sent an inquiry to Rippling that included Slack messages from inside Rippling, which the startup concluded were collected by the Deel spy, the filing says. Additionally, email records suggest that the spy met with Deel executives in December, Rippling said in the complaint.

“We always prefer to win by building the best products and we don’t turn to the legal system lightly,” Parker Conrad, Rippling’s co-founder and CEO, said in a Monday X post. “But we are taking this extraordinary step to send a clear message that this type of misconduct has no place in our industry.”

This isn’t Conrad’s first legal entanglement over data access. In 2015, ADP dropped a defamation lawsuit that claimed his previous HR startup, Zenefits, had obtained information from clients in order to provide them with payment processing services.

WATCH: 2025 will be ‘year of reckoning’ for AI implementation: HR software firm

2025 will be 'year of reckoning' for AI implementation: HR software firm

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This startup is creating a global tech platform for recycled wood

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This startup is creating a global tech platform for recycled wood

Clean Start: This startup is finding new ways to recycle reclaimed wood

Each year 36 million trees fall due to decay, disease, natural disasters or clearing for new development. The vast majority of those trees are either burned, sent to a landfill or ground up for mulch, which wastes energy and causes carbon emissions. 

Now, new technology is being used to find, transport and recycle that wood and make it useful once again.

Cambium is a startup aiming to disrupt the wood recycling space. Its Baltimore-based researchers are working on new ways to track, treat and transfer old wood into the supply chain. It bills itself as the platform “where timber meets tech.”

“We make it really easy to source wood that would have otherwise been wasted and we build technology for the wood industry so that we can save material, create new local jobs and address climate change at scale,” said CEO Ben Christensen.

Every piece of Cambium’s “carbon smart” wood has a barcode. Scan it, and Cambium’s app will identify what the species is, when it was milled and what its grade is.

Cambium’s technology helps find, recycle and then deliver the wood across the United States and to parts of Canada. The company works with local tree care services, trucking companies and saw mills as well as companies like Amazon, CBRE, Gensler and Room and Board.

“We help truckers coordinate loads so they can actually move this material, and then we help sawmills source that material, track that material when they’re actually using it within their sawmill and then ultimately sell that material as well,” Christensen said.

Recycled wood at Cambium.

Van Applegate | CNBC

While there are local wood recyclers, no one else is addressing the supply chain on a national scale, said Christensen, adding that he expects to eventually go global. This potential is enticing to investors.

“For us, as a venture capitalist who is looking to invest in businesses that kind of can go to the moon and become billion dollar businesses, this meets all the criteria,” said Adrian Fenty, founding managing partner at MaC Venture Capital. 

Cambium is also backed by Volo Earth Ventures, NEA and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, among others. The startup has raised $28.5 million in total funding so far.

If it was possible to salvage all the discarded wood material in the U.S., humans could source about half of our total demand, Christensen said. 

Cambium doubled its sales last year, and Christensen said the big growth was on the software side. Its revenue comes from direct sales of wood to end users and from sales of software into the wood industry to facilitate moving, tracking and selling the recycled product.

“It’s critical for Silicon Valley investors, because we don’t want to invest in a wood company,” Fenty said. “We don’t want to invest in a construction company. We want to invest in a software company.”

Among the challenges ahead are the Trump administration’s tariffs on Canadian lumber, Christensen said. Those tariffs are expected to impact Cambium’s business, especially in the northeast region of the U.S.

“We’re moving material to sawmills that are 10 or 20 miles away across the border, and so obviously trade policy really impacts how that material moves,” Christensen said.

CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.

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AI that can match humans at any task will be here in five to 10 years, Google DeepMind CEO says

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AI that can match humans at any task will be here in five to 10 years, Google DeepMind CEO says

Google DeepMind co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis speaks during the Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry’s biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona, Spain, Feb. 26, 2024.

Pau Barrena | Afp | Getty Images

LONDON — Artificial intelligence that can match humans at any task is still some way off — but it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a reality, according to the CEO of Google DeepMind.

Speaking at a briefing in DeepMind’s London offices on Monday, Demis Hassabis said that he thinks artificial general intelligence (AGI) — which is as smart or smarter than humans — will start to emerge in the next five or 10 years.

“I think today’s systems, they’re very passive, but there’s still a lot of things they can’t do. But I think over the next five to 10 years, a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore and we’ll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence,” Hassabis said.

Hassabis defined AGI as “a system that’s able to exhibit all the complicated capabilities that humans can.”

“We’re not quite there yet. These systems are very impressive at certain things. But there are other things they can’t do yet, and we’ve still got quite a lot of research work to go before that,” Hassabis said.

Hassabis isn’t alone in suggesting that it’ll take a while for AGI to appear. Last year, the CEO of Chinese tech giant Baidu Robin Li said he sees AGI is “more than 10 years away,” pushing back on excitable predictions from some of his peers about this breakthrough taking place in a much shorter timeframe.

Some time to go yet

Hassabis’ forecast pushes the timeline to reach AGI some way back compared to what his industry peers have been sketching out.

Dario Amodei, CEO of AI startup Anthropic, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January that he sees a form of AI that’s “better than almost all humans at almost all tasks” emerging in the “next two or three years.”

Watch CNBC's full interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei

What’s needed to reach AGI?

Hassabis said that the main challenge with achieving artificial general intelligence is getting today’s AI systems to a point of understanding context from the real world.

Big Tech hunts for AGI at any cost

While it’s been possible to develop systems that can break down problems and complete tasks autonomously in the realm of games — such as the complex strategy board game Go — bringing such a technology into the real world is proving harder.

“The question is, how fast can we generalize the planning ideas and agentic kind of behaviors, planning and reasoning, and then generalize that over to working in the real world, on top of things like world models — models that are able to understand the world around us,” Hassabis said.”

“And I think we’ve made good progress with the world models over the last couple of years,” he added. “So now the question is, what’s the best way to combine that with these planning algorithms?”

Hassabis and Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud computing division, said that so-called “multi-agent” AI systems are a technological advancement that’s gaining a lot of traction behind the scenes.

Hassabis said lots of work is being done to get to this stage. One example he referred to is DeepMind’s work getting AI agents to figure out how to play the popular strategy game “Starcraft.”

“We’ve done a lot of work on that with things like Starcraft game in the past, where you have a society of agents, or a league of agents, and they could be competing, they could be cooperating,” DeepMind’s chief said.

“When you think about agent to agent communication, that’s what we’re also doing to allow an agent to express itself … What are your skills? What kind of tools do you use?” Kurian said.

“Those are all elements that you need to be able to ask an agent a question, and then once you have that interface, then other agents can communicate with it,” he added.

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