The TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 energy programme may be the first conference agenda where the speakers have already signed power purchase agreements. When the Smart Systems Stage opens at San Francisco’s Moscone Center from 13 to 15 October, the executives on its panels will not be speculating about commercial fusion: several of them are already contracted to deliver it.
The stage sits at the intersection of AI’s voracious electricity appetite and the race to satisfy it, covering grid modernisation, data-centre power procurement, and the fusion startups that have moved from theoretical physics into negotiating with utilities.
Fusion Companies Move From Lab to Grid
The clearest sign that fusion has crossed into commercial territory came on 28 April 2026, when Commonwealth Fusion Systems applied to connect its first ARC power plant, sited in Chesterfield County, Virginia, to PJM Interconnection, the largest wholesale electricity market in the United States. It was the first such application from any fusion company. The timeline the company is working to: electricity delivery in the early 2030s.
Before that filing, CFS had already secured the world’s first Conditional Use Permit for a commercial fusion power plant in 2025 and signed strategic offtake agreements with Google and Eni. The company’s SPARC machine, under construction in Devens, Massachusetts, is expected in 2027 to become the first commercially relevant fusion device to produce more energy from fusion than it consumes, clearing the net-energy threshold (Q>1) that has eluded the field for decades. Brandon Sorbom, CFS’s Chief Science Officer, will appear on the Smart Systems Stage alongside Helion CEO David Kirtley.
Helion has its own commercial anchors. In 2023 it announced the world’s first commercial-scale fusion power purchase agreement, committing to supply Microsoft with at least 50 megawatts of electricity from its first plant, with operations targeted for 2028 and Constellation Energy handling transmission. Later that year, Helion and Nucor Corporation agreed to develop a 500-MWe fusion plant at one of Nucor’s manufacturing facilities, targeting a start date of 2030.
The third fusion company on the stage arrives with a different physics lineage. Inertia, a San Francisco-based startup announced in August 2025, is commercialising inertial fusion energy, the laser-based approach that produced the world’s first controlled fusion ignition at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in December 2022. Co-founder Andrea ‘Annie’ Kritcher was part of that Livermore team; co-founder Mike Dunne is a professor of photon science at Stanford University and associate laboratory director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Jeff Lawson, the third co-founder, is best known as the creator of Twilio.
Inertia raised a $450 million Series A, according to Bloomberg, with plans that include building what the company describes as the world’s most powerful laser and targeting grid-scale energy production in the 2030s, each plant capable of powering a million homes or a medium-to-large city. At Disrupt, Lawson will discuss how his experience scaling Twilio shapes his thinking on talent, timelines, and the engineering challenges ahead.
The TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Energy Agenda Beyond Fusion
Fusion is not the only constraint on the agenda. Two further sessions address the infrastructure that has to function while fusion matures. A grid modernisation panel features Drew Baglino, founder and chief executive of Heron Power, and Apoorv Bhargava, chief executive and co-founder of WeaveGrid, examining where investment is flowing as electricity demand outpaces the infrastructure built to carry it.
A separate session on AI’s power problem brings together Sara Spangelo, President and Co-Founder of Ambrosia Energy, and Bill Thayer, SVP and Head of Datacenter Solutions at Bloom Energy, to address how data-centre operators are securing electricity as compute demand accelerates. The session frames what happens if they fail: a power bottleneck that slows AI development before the next wave of model capability can arrive.
The TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 energy stage passes the test that most conference programming fails: the people speaking have skin in the outcome. Whether SPARC hits its 2027 net-energy target will be the number to watch before the Moscone Center doors open in October.
