Issue
The tens of billions of yuan that Beijing has poured into its fusion sector in the three years since a US laboratory made a major technological breakthrough have catapulted China’s nuclear fusion program into a world leader in many categories. While US fusion efforts may still be making more scientific breakthroughs, a newly centralized and reinvigorated effort in China is preparing for the future industrial — and potentially even commercial — deployment of fusion on a scale not seen in any other country. This has alarmed policymakers in Washington, where the race toward fusion is increasingly viewed in a geostrategic lens.
Beijing Goes All In
There appears to have been a step change in China’s longstanding nuclear fusion efforts — which go back as far as the 1960s — ever since the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved “ignition,” a net energy demonstration of at what researchers call “scientific breakeven,” which considers just the amount of power applied to the plasma to achieve fusion. This was seen as a breakthrough of global proportions, and even though there still remains the larger commercial hurdle of reaching “engineering breakeven,” in which the demonstration produces more energy than the input for the entire system, the NIF breakthrough immediately prompted a step change in Chinese fusion efforts.
“China’s serious and moving fast,” US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told the recent AI + Fusion Summit hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP). “China has had massive investments since our NIF breakthrough, and maybe since a few years before that, from 2019 to today, China has spent maybe close to $10 billion on fusion,” Wright told the Oct. 14 summit in Washington.
That might be only a fraction of how much Beijing might ultimately spend on fusion efforts, given its apparent strategic centrality. “Fusion sits at the intersection of science, engineering and national strategy,” said a researcher at Tsinghua University’s Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology. “China’s integrated approach shows it now regards fusion not as a dream — but as a sector in formation.” Just this week, Beijing emphasized the importance of nuclear fusion by listing it alongside hydrogen energy as strategic “future industries” in China’s 15th five-year plan, a draft proposal for the superpower’s 2026-30 economic development.
“China is executing an aggressive, state-led, infrastructure-first strategy” to “dominate fusion’s commercial ecosystem,” concluded the Oct. 9 report from the Commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy. “The race is no longer theoretical; it is unfolding now, and the consequences of losing would reverberate across energy security, economic leadership, and national power.” The commission is an ad hoc bipartisan group chaired by two senators and operated under the aegis of the SCSP, a nonpartisan Washington-based organization established to make policy recommendations regarding US competitiveness in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
“We still lead the world when it comes to fusion on R&D [research and development], and we still have the biggest companies in terms of private investment in the United States,” Luke Murry, the head of governmental affairs at US-based semiconductor manufacturer Marvell Technology, told the AI + Fusion summit. “But I’m really concerned about how China is setting itself up in being able to scale fusion technology once those technical breakthroughs are achieved.”
Institutional Push
As part of this effort to look forward toward scaling fusion on a commercial, industrial level, China has created a new state-owned company to move fusion from scientific experiment to engineering reality. The China Fusion Energy Co. (CFEC), a subsidiary of longtime state nuclear fission champion China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC), was launched in late September with registered capital of 15 billion yuan ($2 billion).
According to Francois Morin, director for China at the World Nuclear Association, CFEC is “a state-owned company, subsidiary of CNNC and aimed at commercializing fusion energy by 2050.” It functions largely as a coordinating body rather than a stand-alone enterprise, working with major institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ (CAS) Institute of Plasma Physics in Hefei, which operates the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (East) reactor, and the Southwestern Institute of Physics in Chengdu, which collaborates with the international ITER project.
“CFEC doesn’t really act as a separate company with its own human resources and private goals,” Morin said. “It’s more a coordination tool between existing entities. It can take advantage of CNNC capital … and can make a kind of cherry-picking of human resources.”
Morin noted that CFEC will steer several key projects, including the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), expected to produce a net electrical output of 100–200 megawatts, and the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak (BEST), designed to validate plasma conditions for CFETR. The company is also backing newer concepts such as the Xinghuo fission–fusion reactor planned for Yaohu Science Island in Jiangxi province and laser-based fusion research in Mianyang, Sichuan.
Breakthroughs and Global Context
“China has not yet achieved ignition and trails the US in laser fusion and plasma physics,” noted the commission on the Scaling of Fusion Energy report, but “China is making significant bets on magnetic confinement concepts.”
Indeed, at the beginning of this year, scientists at the Institute of Plasma Physics made a new record with their East reactor, a machine dedicated to exploring long-pulse, high-performance plasma operations at CAS’s “Hefei science island” — and enormous fusion complex — in Anhui province. In January, East maintained fusion plasma at 70 million degrees Celsius for 1,066 seconds — a world record. In September, the CAS reported another record at its Hefei campus: a steady magnetic field of 35.1 tesla generated by a fully superconducting magnet, surpassing the previous 32.35 tesla mark and operated stably for 30 minutes.
Morin said that while such results are noteworthy, partial milestones do not yet resolve fusion’s fundamental technical equation — achieving high temperature, stability and plasma density simultaneously. “In fusion, reaching a so-called breakthrough may be nice to announce, but it doesn’t solve the core question,” he said.
These announcements are ricocheting around the world as various fusion efforts push past each other. The January milestone achieved at East, for instance, was surpassed in February by France’s Commission on Atomic Energy at its West tokamak in Cadarache, France, which was operated for 1,337 seconds. Morin pointed to another example: the use of Rebco (Rare Earth Barium Copper Oxide) superconducting materials for high-field magnets. “A private US company — Commonwealth Fusion Systems — achieved the demonstration of a 20 tesla superconducting magnet in 2021,” Morin noted. “But a Chinese private company named Energy Singularity has also created a similar magnet … and reached 21.7 tesla in early 2025.”
Morin said both Energy Singularity and CFEC are developing next-generation magnets using the same material, with results expected before 2030. Energy Singularity, a private venture with limited funds, is pursuing a 25 tesla system and plans its first electricity-producing tokamak before the end of the decade. CFEC, backed by CNNC’s resources, is targeting the BEST program around 2040 and a commercial demonstration reactor by 2045.
From Research to Industry
By linking with heavy-equipment producers such as Shanghai Electric, CFEC aims to build a domestic supply chain for superconducting magnets, vacuum vessels and tritium-handling systems.
“Fusion’s bottleneck is no longer the physics — it’s engineering integration,” said the Tsinghua researcher. “CFEC’s creation shows China recognizes that transition and intends to mobilize its manufacturing base accordingly.” Morin described CFEC’s advantage as its ability to coordinate expertise and funding across the national system rather than duplicate existing work. Its initial $2.1 billion capitalization gives it flexibility to scale operations as milestones are met, while future financing will depend on early technical results.
Energy Singularity, by contrast, has raised about $360 million in private investment and employs fewer than 200 people. Morin noted that China’s state system can expand staffing quickly if progress warrants it: “In China, growth in personnel is not a problem,” he quipped.
“It’s about deployment now, and we’ve seen how we’ve lost out in other sectors, right?” Nadia Schadlow, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, who is also on the SCSP board of advisors, told the Oct. 14 summit, referring to China pulling ahead in any number of other energy sectors. “China has led in renewables, led in battery production, critical minerals mining, all the inputs and components. So innovation is not enough.”
Strategic Long Game
Morin believes China’s timelines are ambitious but not unrealistic compared with US private companies or the international ITER project. “Obstacles are still numerous and of all kinds — material resistance, fuel production, costs and economics,” he said. “The only thing we can say today is China is not late and could even overtake US private companies as well as ITER.”
He also cautioned against overstating fusion’s eventual scale. “In the mid-century, even if successful, fusion energy production could reach a few gigawatts capacity, which will remain a tiny portion of electricity[‘s] total capacity and even less share of primary energy,” he said. China’s total installed power capacity is projected to reach about 3,600 GW by the end of 2025.
Other China observers agree. “Fusion won’t have a demonstration reactor theoretically completed until 2035, and mass commercial deployment couldn’t begin until after that,” said David Fishman, a power-sector expert and principal at Shanghai-based consultancy The Lantau Group. “There’s no time for fusion to mature quickly enough to become the power generation backbone by 2050 or 2060. Fusion will take us to the stars someday, I’m sure — but it’s not going to play a meaningful role in net zero in the next 30 years.”
Still, Morin called China’s progress “remarkable,” describing its approach as both “reliable” and “convincing.” He said fusion’s main benefits will come through spillovers into materials science, superconductivity and advanced manufacturing — technologies that also strengthen China’s conventional nuclear and clean-energy sectors.
“Fusion is more than just an energy generation technology, but the first nation that is able to commercialize it and scale it will really have the opportunity to reshape the whole geopolitical landscape,” David Lin, a senior advisor for future technology platforms at SCSP who previously served in the US State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, told the Oct. 14 summit. “That’s the key reason why we’re seeing the US and China pursue this technology so rigorously.”
