NEW YORK: Google has thrown its weight behind Proxima Fusion, a Germany-based startup aiming to build Europe’s first commercial fusion power plant, joining a 411 million euro ($468 million) funding round the company announced Tuesday.
The investment pushes Proxima’s valuation to $2.7 billion and signals Google’s continued bet on fusion as a long-term source of abundant, carbon-free, and reliable energy.
Nuclear fusion works by fusing two hydrogen atoms into one helium atom, unleashing enormous amounts of energy in the process. It’s the opposite reaction to fission, which powers every commercial nuclear plant operating today by splitting atoms apart. While fusion promises a nearly limitless energy supply, no company has yet managed to deploy it commercially, the entire industry is still racing to clear steep technical hurdles.
Who’s Behind the Round
The financing was led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures, with utility giant RWE and Google joining as strategic investors. A roster of venture firms including Plural, UVC Partners, Balderton, and Cherry Ventures, also chipped in.
Proxima cofounder and CEO Francesco Sciortino framed the raise as proof of Europe’s competitive standing in the global fusion race.
“Europe is racing with the United States and China to get to the first fusion power plant,” Sciortino said in a statement. “Proxima’s financing demonstrates that Europe can not only invent breakthrough technologies, but also build globally competitive companies around them.”
He added that investors “recognise both the urgency and the opportunity of what we’re doing” in backing what he called a “generational energy technology company.”
Betting on Stellarators
Proxima is pursuing stellarator technology one of several competing approaches to achieving fusion. The company hopes to have a working fusion demonstrator, essentially a proof-of-concept precursor to a full commercial plant, running by the early 2030s, with an actual commercial power plant targeted for later in that decade.
The fresh capital will go toward scaling up production of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) cables and magnets, along with building out the engineering and manufacturing systems stellarators require. Proxima also plans to expand its hiring across engineering, manufacturing, and operations to keep the timeline on track.
How It Stacks Up Against U.S. Rivals
Despite being the best-funded fusion startup in Europe by a wide margin, Proxima still trails its American counterparts in total capital raised.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) raised $863 million last August alone, bringing its cumulative funding to $2.9 billion, according to Dealroom data. Helion Energy, backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, pulled in $465 million just last month, putting its total at $1.5 billion.
Google’s fusion bets extend beyond Proxima, it’s also an investor in CFS and signed an offtake agreement with the company in June 2025 to purchase power once its first commercial plant comes online.
“Fusion holds huge potential as an energy source of the future: it’s clean, abundant and inherently safe, and it can be built just about anywhere,” Google said in a blog post at the time. But the tech giant also acknowledged the road ahead is far from certain, noting that commercializing fusion is “immensely challenging, and success is not guaranteed.”
