No Myth: Thea Energy Poised to Shine Light on Nuclear Fusion Future

Harnessing the power of the sun: Is there an app for that?

Maybe that seems like a cosmic joke, funny or not, but seriously the advent of a golden era in supercomputing is promising to open portals to tame even the rawest elements of energy, physics and mathematics.

Ironically, artificial intelligence might open the real gateway to a new form of utility energy to meet a massive influx of new demand from data centers and industrial electrification.

Every year, the Compute for Climate Fellowship funds climate tech startups which are using advanced cloud computing to build proof of concepts for their next-gen inventions. The program is led by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in partnership with UNESCO’s International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI).

AWS and IRCAI are expanding the program to explore even more areas of climate tech and dedicating $4 million in AWS cloud-computing credits toward helping startups scale up their computing power to address the climate crisis.

So what does AI have to offer the energy transition?

Perhaps part of the story can be told through the superconductive lens of a company called Thea Energy, which was spun out of research at Princeton University and is working toward a breakthrough on a type of nuclear fusion.

Thea Energy is named after the Greek goddess of divine light and the mother of Helios (the sun) in mythology. It is working on scaling up fusion creation tool called the Stellarator, something born out of research decades ago but limited by the monumental calculations required to contain the heat of charged gas plasma reaching up to 150 million degrees Celsius.

“It’s always been the holy grail of energy, but it’s hard to do,” Brian Berzin, co-founder and CEO of Thea Energy, said in an interview with EnergyTech.com. “It’s hard to do but I would argue that’s inevitable.”

Thea Energy was one of eight awardees for the Global Compute for Climate Fellowship list announced in late 2024 by AWS and IRCAI. The company also has benefited from $20 million in a Series A funding round and is operating its research out of a home facility in Kearny, New Jersey.

The work is focused on a hardware system called the Stellarator which dates back more than seven decades but wasn’t progressing due to computational roadblocks.

Thea Energy’s technology utilizes magnetic confinement focused on containing that bewildering level of heat within the hydrogen-rich plasma from which the fusion energy is released. Numerous experimenters have achieved new levels of net energy gain from fusion work in recent years, so Thea Energy’s achievement and aims are not out of the realm of possibility.

“It takes intricate math to optimize,” Thea Energy CEO Berzin pointed out. “Theoretically it was developed in the 1980s (and earlier) but the computers weren’t there. In the last five years the immense capabilities with clusters of hardware now in the GPU (graphic processing unit) universe allow us to design better systems.

“Whether it’s confining the plasma or compressing (as other fusion systems are trying), you’re dealing with a lot of thermodynamics,” he added. “How can you keep that heat in the plasma?”

Thea Energy has achieved some level of commercially relevant success in its experiments but only in an academic setting. Where the AWS and the Compute for Climate Fellowship awards help is in scaling that up to a prototype which can eventually go commercial. The first goal is completing and confirming the physical and supercomputing parts of the Stellarator fusion work, then taking those proof points and putting them together to build a scalable and repeatable architecture.

Berzin says the first part is under way and the goal of building commercial nuclear fusion power plants for customers could be realized in 10 years.

“The Stellarator has operated for hours of run time; that’s what allows us to take the next step,” he noted. “We need a power plant (scale) to work in a steady state.”

Climate crisis requires bold energy moves

The Compute for Climate Fellowship first selected only four recipients in 2023 before doubling that to the eight awards which included Thea Energy last year. This year, it was announced Tuesday, 20 startups will get proof-of-concepts built for free with mentorship from AWS and IRCAI experts.

“With the effects of the climate crisis intensifying, it is imperative that we support the development of a broad set of approaches to bring new climate solutions to life,” Lisbeth Kaufman, head of Climate Tech Startups Business Development at AWS, said in a statement. “From fusion energy to smarter grids, to generative AI models to discover climate resilient plants and deep-sea drones to map the ocean, we’ve seen how advanced cloud computing and AI can unlock new possibilities for a more sustainable future.”

AWS itself, like many of the world's tech giants, is concerned about grid resource adequacy for incoming AI-enabled data centers and is making connections to both conventional nuclear and small modular reactor startups.

Why fusion may evolve from a theory to a future resource

The theory of nuclear fusion is not new, but it also isn’t containable or repeatable yet. Such massive forces of thermodynamics are enthralling, dangerous and complex on a scale hard to envision even by Moore’s Law of computing capacity trends.

The ITER project is one such example of massive scale utilizing tokamak fusion technology—another device which uses magnetic confinement—while other projects at the Livermore National Lab in the U.S and work in China are making inroads on sustaining fusion energy.

“It’s always been the next big thing,” Berzin said, before adding the obligatory, “but it’s really hard to do.”

Indeed it is. Hydrogen is abundant in the world so providing that for fusion isn’t the big deal. Magnetically confining those 150 million degrees is something else again. Ouch if you get it wrong.

“Trying to hold back that ridiculous level of heat, that’s what needs a serious computation stack,” Berzin said.

Coming up with the magnetic, rare elemental power is also difficult on a supply chain level, although he assures that Thea Energy has secured superconducting tape from numerous vendors from across the globe, including the U.S.

“We build our own superconducting magnets in house,” Berzin pointed out. “And our system is designed to work with basic manufacturing processes. . . We want to use alloys that are well known. We want to use stainless steel, which is cheap and available.”

Stainless steel has been around a long time and even taken for granted, but Elon Musk turned to it for his SpaceX rocket. What is old is new again in state-of-the-art hardware mated with AI-ready software.

“We can iterate quickly and on demand,” Thea Energy’s Berzin said. Having superconductor capability “puts it on a completely new level.”

In addition to AWS, IRCAI and U.S. Department of Energy support for its nuclear fusion work, Thea Energy’s $20 million in Series A funding came from a group including Prelude Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Orion Industrial Ventures and others.

Applications for the 2025 Compute for Climate Fellowship are open now until April 6. Climate tech startups, entrepreneurs, and researchers from around the world are welcome to submit ideas that leverage advanced computing technologies to address climate change mitigation or adaptation.