Google DeepMind has joined forces with Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) in a research partnership aimed at moving fusion energy forward. Fusion, the process that powers the sun, holds the potential for clean, abundant energy without the long-lived radioactive waste. It requires keeping an ionized gas, or plasma, stable at temperatures above 100 million degrees Celsius inside the confines of a fusion device. DeepMind is tackling this challenge with artificial intelligence, working to control one of the hardest physics problems in energy research.
CFS, a well-known leader in fusion energy, is taking an ambitious approach with its compact tokamak, SPARC. The device uses high-temperature superconducting magnets and is built to produce more energy from fusion than it takes to sustain the reaction, a milestone called “breakeven.” Reaching this point is an important step toward making fusion a practical energy source for the world.
The collaboration builds on DeepMind’s earlier breakthroughs in AI-guided plasma control. Working with the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), DeepMind demonstrated that deep reinforcement learning could control tokamak magnets to stabilize complex plasma shapes. To expand this work, the team also created TORAX, a fast, differentiable plasma simulator written in JAX. TORAX allows researchers to explore a wider range of plasma behaviors more efficiently, testing strategies that were previously too complex or time-consuming.
The partnership’s work centers on three main objectives:
- Creating a fast and accurate differentiable simulation of fusion plasma.
- Finding the most efficient and reliable ways to get the most out of fusion energy.
- Exploring new real-time control methods using reinforcement learning.
Bringing together DeepMind’s AI skills and CFS’s advanced hardware gives the partnership a real chance to speed up fusion research. And beyond its scientific impact, the effort seeks to make fusion-generated electricity a reality on the grid, bringing clean, safe power to communities everywhere.