Breaking ground on a 225,000-square-foot campus in Albuquerque, Pacific Fusion has set its Pacific Fusion net facility gain ambition in concrete: a working demonstration system that consumes no more energy than it produces, targeted for 2030.
‘It’s a huge step forward for commercial fusion power,’ said Carrie von Muench, co-founder and chief operating officer. ‘To our knowledge, there’s no such facility being constructed in the country.’
What the Albuquerque Campus Is Actually Built to Do
The new facility, situated at Mesa del Sol, will test Pacific Fusion’s pulsed-power approach to fusion: tightly coordinated bursts of electricity create a magnetic field around a fuel target roughly the size of a pencil eraser, squeezing it until the atoms fuse. Each pulse from the full demonstration system will generate on the order of 100 megajoules, around ten times the output of the National Ignition Facility.
‘This exists nowhere in the world,’ Keith LeChien, co-founder and chief technical officer, said of the system. ‘China is building these types of facilities, and we intend to be the first to deliver them.’
The demonstration system will be capable of firing a handful of shots per day. A commercial power plant will eventually need to complete one shot per second, and its reactor will need to generate roughly five times more energy than the demonstration unit, partly to power the additional equipment a grid-connected plant requires.
Pacific Fusion’s pulser architecture is built around 156 modules, each containing 32 circular stages made up of 10 bricks. Each brick pairs two capacitors with one switch. Earlier this year, a one-third-scale pulser module released 440 gigawatts of peak power in 80 nanoseconds during testing, results good enough to authorise the Albuquerque build.
The campus will also host national security experiments involving high-yield fusion. At the groundbreaking, Pacific Fusion and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) signed a memorandum of understanding covering collaboration on high-yield fusion, high-energy-density science, pulsed-power technologies, advanced materials, and modelling and simulation. The company also plans to deepen its work with Sandia National Laboratories on the next generation of pulsed-power systems.
The Capital Stack Behind the Pacific Fusion Net Facility Gain Push
Pacific Fusion was founded in 2023 and has raised over $1 billion in a milestone-based Series A round. According to General Catalyst, which structured the arrangement, more than $900 million was committed upfront but is released only as the company clears pre-defined milestones. The company has passed the first two sets of gates; the remainder unlocks on the final milestone. Investors include Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DCVC, and UP.Partners, among others.
Von Muench credits the structure for the company’s pace. ‘I don’t think it would have been possible to move at this speed if we hadn’t designed the capital stack the way that we have.’
New Mexico did its part to close the deal. Albuquerque City Council unanimously approved $776.6 million in industrial revenue bonds, providing tax exemptions for 20 years, alongside $10 million in economic development incentives, according to reporting on the site selection. The New Mexico Governor’s office cited the State Investment Council’s commitments to key sectors as pivotal in attracting the company.
The campus is expected to create more than 200 permanent jobs and hundreds of construction and supply-chain roles, according to the New Mexico Economic Development Department. Pacific Fusion is already operating a manufacturing facility in Los Lunas, New Mexico, which employs about 70 people and produced components for the Mesa del Sol site ahead of the groundbreaking.
The company’s headquarters and three research and development campuses remain in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, making the Albuquerque site its first research and manufacturing campus outside that state.
Pacific Fusion published four peer-reviewed papers in the prior year outlining its technical roadmap and validating simulation tools, including one paper covering what it describes as an affordable, manageable, practical, and scalable approach to high-yield fusion. The company filed its first federal lobbying registration in June 2026, covering energy, nuclear, and defence issue codes, a move that reflects how central government relationships have become to its commercial strategy.
The field Pacific Fusion is racing through is crowded: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion Energy, Proxima Fusion, and Inertia Enterprises are all targeting grid connection by the mid-2030s. Whether the Albuquerque facility clears the net facility gain threshold by 2030 will determine whether Pacific Fusion arrives at that finish line first, or follows.
