China's Private Sector Answer To Nuclear Fusion - NovaFusionX

The company has raised $175 million in the year since its inception, including more than $100 million in its latest funding from an A-list of private equity investors

image credit: Bamboo Works

Key Takeaways:

• NovaFusionX announced it has raised a fresh 700 million yuan just a year after its founding, as it races to develop its modular-style nuclear fusion technology
• China's nuclear fusion industry is behind the U.S., but has gained fresh momentum as AI emerges as a major new customer for the cheap but technically complex power source

China is famous for throwing money at industries it wants to develop, and one of the latest to get that distinction is nuclear fusion – a process that promises to deliver huge amounts of electricity at cheap prices by mimicking the process used in the sun. That campaign for fusion energy has taken on greater urgency with the rise of AI, which is a huge consumer of electricity.

But the latest fusion energy project coming out of China Inc. isn't state funded at all, and instead is being financed by some of the nation's top private equity and venture capital investors, including Hillhouse Capital, Legend Capital and Luminous Ventures, formerly known as Lightspeed Capital. That company, NovaFusion Energy Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., also known as NovaFusionX, made headlines last week when it announced a new funding round worth 700 million yuan ($103 million).

The latest funding comes after NovaFusionX raised an initial 500 million yuan last August, bringing its total fundraising to 1.2 billion yuan in just a year after its founding – a record fundraising speed for a fusion-related startup in China. No valuations have been given, but the backing of such major players indicates NovaFusionX may be China's strongest private sector player to emerge so far in the nuclear fusion space.

That's not to say that NovaFusionX is the only player in China. Most notably, state-owned giant China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) launched its own nuclear fusion company, China Fusion Energy Co. Ltd., last July, with a hefty 11.5 billion yuan in initial funding. That initiative looks like the major fusion play by "Team China," with backing from the likes of state-run oil major PetroChina, as well as the state-backed National Green Development Fund and Zhejiang Zheneng Electric Power ...

Full story available on Benzinga.com