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Investing.com -- Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google announced on Monday it has signed a deal to buy power from a fusion energy project in Virginia, marking the technology’s first direct corporate power purchase agreement.
The agreement with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a company that spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018, is for 200 megawatts of power from CFS’s ARC project being developed in Chesterfield, Virginia.
Google is also increasing its investment in CFS, though financial details were not disclosed. The tech giant was among investors that put a total of $1.8 billion into CFS in 2021, and CFS CEO Bob Mumgaard indicated Google’s new investment was "comparable" to its previous one.
Fusion energy, which powers the sun and stars, involves forcing light atoms together to release large amounts of energy. Unlike nuclear fission, fusion does not generate large amounts of radioactive waste and could help combat climate change if successfully commercialized.
"Yes, there are some serious physics and engineering challenges that we still have to work through to make it commercially viable and scalable," said Michael Terrell, Google’s head of advanced energy. "But that’s something that we want to be investing in now to realize that future."
CFS aims to generate power from the 400 MW ARC project in the early 2030s, but must first overcome significant scientific hurdles. The company is currently assembling its SPARC demonstration machine in Massachusetts, which uses high-temperature superconductor magnets arranged in a tokamak design to confine and control plasma.
The deal comes as artificial intelligence and data centers are driving up power demand globally. Virginia is home to the world’s largest hub of energy-hungry data centers.
This agreement builds on Google’s clean energy initiatives, which include procurement of over 22 GW of clean energy since 2010, helping reduce its data center energy emissions by 12%.
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