EVERETT, Wash. — It’s a bold ambition to try and replicate on earth the physics that power the sun and the stars.

But clean power innovator Helion Energy is doing much more than that. It’s building its seventh-generation fusion prototype to prove that its technology will deliver energy to the grid while simultaneously constructing a commercial power plant in Central Washington and establishing manufacturing operations to assemble future facilities.

It all rides on Helion’s technology for smashing atoms to work as planned.

“Our goal is not just to do fusion, not just to make energy, but to make electricity,” said Helion CEO and co-founder David Kirtley.

Helion’s multi-track strategy — developing the prototype while standing up industrial-scale production — reflects the belief that speed will be key once fusion is proven viable.

The company recently signed a lease near its Everett headquarters for a 166,000 square-foot space dubbed Omega where the company will install an assembly line to build the thousands of capacitors needed to deliver massive surges of electricity to its fusion generator and capture the energy it produces.

“Helion is a manufacturing company,” said Sofia Gizzi, Helion’s senior manager of production. “It’s not an R&D company. It’s not a science experiment. It’s very much a manufacturing company.”

To meet its lofty goals, Helion has charted rapid growth in recent years — landing huge investments, hitting a headcount of more than 500 employees, and spreading its footprint across an industrial region north of Seattle that’s also home to aviation titan Boeing.

All of that expansion is built on the promise of fusion — though no company or research institution has yet demonstrated it can create affordable electricity from fusion, the so-called Holy Grail of clean energy.

If it works, the demand is there. Data centers and AI expansion, plus economy-wide efforts to electrify transportation, building heating and cooling, and industrial operations are all hungry for clean power.

Microsoft, which is investing heavily in AI-related data center infrastructure, has agreed to buy the electricity produced by the 50-megawatt Orion plant.

“While the path to commercial fusion is still unfolding, we’re proud to support Helion’s pioneering work here in Washington state as part of our broader commitment to investing in sustainable energy,” said Melanie Nakagawa, Microsoft’s chief sustainability officer, when Orion broke ground in July.

Manufacturing strategies

Building fusion plants requires more than physics breakthroughs — it demands industrial muscle. That’s where Helion’s Omega facility comes in.

The company has long aimed to keep its manufacturing and assembly in-house. The approach avoided supply chain disruptions during the pandemic, could help skirt fluctuating tariffs and, perhaps most importantly, allows for quick adjustments as facility designs and operations are fine-tuned.

Standing inside Omega’s freshly painted, gleaming white space just minutes from Helion’s headquarters, Gizzi explained that the proximity between engineering and manufacturing is strategic.

“If you want to scale quickly, and if you want to be able to build an intelligent manufacturing process, you have to have [manufacturing] engineers with a really good understanding of how the thing works,” Gizzi said. “And you have to have design engineers with a really good understanding of what’s hard about manufacturing.”

Helion’s manufacturing-first philosophy aligns with a broader push to restore American production capacity. Washington state congressional leaders Sen. Maria Cantwell and Rep. Suzan DelBene recently introduced the bipartisan Fusion Advanced Manufacturing Parity Act, which would provide large tax credits for fusion supply chain components.

“The state of Washington is the world’s leading hub for fusion energy, which one day soon could provide vast amounts of the type of power we need to keep electricity prices down and increase America’s economic competitiveness,” Cantwell said in announcing the bill last month.

Looking to 2030

Outside of public support, Helion raised $425 million in January specifically to finance its manufacturing build out in the Omega facility. Investors in the round included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, steel manufacturer Nucor, Mithril Capital, SoftBank and others.

The fusion company will begin installing assembly line equipment inside Omega early next year with production starting in late 2026.

The facility will help produce the roughly 2,500 capacitor units needed for the Orion power plant in Malaga, Wash., using both workers and robotics that include off-the-shelf and custom automation technology to significantly expedite the current processes.

With the effort to scale its manufacturing capacity, Helion is focused on the future and what comes after the first plant is running.

“These high volume lines are not for our Orion machine, but for the next machine,” Gizzi said. “A factory operating at 50% of its design capacity or less can spit out Orion, no problem. But we’re really looking beyond that into 2030.”

EVERETT, Wash. — In an industrial stretch of Everett is a boxy, windowless building called Ursa. Inside that building is a vault built from concrete blocks up to 5 feet thick with an additional layer of radiation-absorbing plastic. Within that vault is Polaris, a machine that could change the world.

Helion Energy is trying to replicate the physics that fuel the sun and the stars — hence the celestial naming theme — to provide nearly limitless power on earth through fusion reactions.

The company recently invited a small group of journalists to visit its headquarters and see Polaris, which is the seventh iteration of its fusion generator and the prototype for a commercial facility called Orion that broke ground this summer in Malaga in Central Washington.

Few people outside of Helion have been provided such access; photographs were not allowed.

“We run these systems right now at 100 million degrees, about 10 times the temperature of the sun, and compress them to high pressure… the same pressure as the bottom of the Marianas Trench,” said Helion CEO and co-founder David Kirtley, referencing the deepest part of the ocean.

Polaris and its vault occupy a relative small footprint inside of Ursa. The majority of the space is filled with 2,500 power units. They’re configured into 4-foot-by-4-foot pallets, lined up in rows and stacked seven high. The units are packed with capacitors that are charged from the grid to provide super high intensity pulses of electricity — 100 gigawatts of peak power — that create the temperatures and pressure needed for fusion reactions.

All of that energy is carried through miles and miles of coaxial cables filled with copper, aluminum and custom-metal alloys. End-to-end, the cables would stretch across Washington state and back again — roughly 720 miles. They flow in thick, black bundles from the pallets into the vault. They curl on the floor in giant heaps before connecting to the tubular-shaped, 60-foot-long Polaris generator.

The ultimate goal is for the generator to force lightweight ions to fuse, creating a super hot plasma that expands, pushing on a magnetic field that surrounds it. The energy created by that expansion is directly captured and carried back the capacitors to recharge them so the process can be repeated over and over again.

And the small amount of extra power that’s produced by fusion goes into the electrical grid for others to use — or at least that’s the plan for the future.

‘Worth being aggressive’

Helion is a contender in a global race to generate fusion power for a rapidly escalating demand for electricity, driven in part by data centers and AI. No one so far has been able to make and capture enough energy from fusion to commercialize the process, but dozens of companies — including three other competitors in the Pacific Northwest — are trying.

The company aims by 2028 to begin producing energy at the Malaga site, which Microsoft has agreed to purchase. If it hits this extremely ambitious target — and many are highly skeptical — it could be the world’s first company to do so.

“There is a level of risk, of being aggressive with program development, new technology and timelines,” Kirtley said. “But I think it’s worth it. Fusion is the same process that happens in the stars. It has the promise of very low cost electricity that’s clean and safe and base load and always on. And so it’s worth being aggressive.”

Some in the sector worry that Helion will miss the mark and cast doubt on a sector that is working hard to prove itself. At a June event, the head of R&D for fusion competitor Zap Energy questioned Helion’s deadline.

“I don’t see a commercial application in the next few years happening,” said Ben Levitt. “There is a lot of complicated science and engineering still to be discovered and to be applied.”

Others are willing to take the bet. Helion has raised more than $1 billion from investors that include SoftBank, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sam Altman, who is OpenAI’s CEO and co-founder, as well as Helion’s longtime chair of its board of directors. The company is able to unlock an additional $1.8 billion if it hits Polaris milestones.

The generator has been operating since December, running all day, five days a week, creating fusion, Kirtley said.

Energy without ignition

Helion is highly cautious — some would say too cautious — in sharing details on its progress. Helion officials say they must hold their tech close to the vest as Chinese competitors have stolen pieces of their intellectual property; critics say the secrecy makes it difficult for the scientific community to verify their likelihood of success in a very risky, highly technical field.

In August, Kirtley shared an online post about Helion’s power-producing strategy, which upends the conventional approach.

Most efforts are trying to achieve ignition in their fusion generators, which is a condition where the reactions produce more power than is required for fusion to occur. This feat was first accomplished at a national lab in California in 2022 — but it still wasn’t enough energy that one could put electricity on the grid.

Helion is not aiming for ignition but rather for a system that is so efficient it can capture enough energy from fusion without reaching that state.

Kirtley compares the strategy for producing power to regenerative braking in electric vehicles. Simply put, an EV’s battery gets the car moving, and regenerative braking by the driver puts energy back into the battery to help it run longer. In the fusion generator, the capacitors provide that initial power, and the fusion reaction resupplies the energy and a little bit more.

“We can recover electricity at high efficiency,” Kirtley said. Compared to other commercial fusion approaches, “we require a lot less fusion. Fusion is the hard part. My goal, ironically, is to do the minimum amount of fusion that we can deliver a product to the customer and generate electricity.”