As of 2025, commercial fusion companies have raised over US$9 billion in investments, while governments are beginning to see fusion as the modern day 'space race'. The IDTechEx report, "Fusion Energy Market 2025-2045: Technologies, Players, Timelines", evaluates and compares the different technical approaches to producing commercial fusion energy, the key players involved, and potential timelines for their deployment.
Anticipated dates for the first power-producing commercial plant for major fusion startups. Source: IDTechEx
Why now for fusion?
The largest funding rounds for commercial fusion occurred largely in the last 5 years. There are now around 50 private companies pursuing commercial fusion, with leaders in the industry demonstrating substantial progress towards generating net positive energy and securing major public and industrial partnerships. But what has changed to bring fusion from research projects to a serious commercial industry?
The commercial fusion market has been catalyzed by recent developments in three areas: a better understanding of the science of fusion, growing global demand for clean energy, and the maturation of enabling technologies.
First, consistent academic progress in understanding plasma physics over multiple decades has now reached the point where fusion technology is becoming ready for commercialization. Research reactors around the world, such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), and Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), all produced record-breaking results in recent years such as increasing the energy gain from fusion or sustaining a stable plasma for a longer time.
Secondly, growing global demand for continuous green energy is essential for decarbonizing data centers and industry. Fusion energy avoids intermittency or the need for energy storage, with fewer radiation-related safety risks than its nuclear cousin, fission, which has also seen renewed interest in powering data centers and microgrids.
Finally, a range of specialized materials, components, and software solutions have reached maturity simultaneously to enable innovative fusion power designs. These include high-temperature superconductors, high-energy short-pulse lasers, and surrogate models for plasma simulations. IDTechEx's report focuses on the value chain for key materials and components and their applications beyond fusion, which startups can pursue to set up secondary revenue streams.
The many ways to bottle a star
The IDTechEx report "Fusion Energy Market 2025-2045: Technologies, Players, Timelines" explores the leading approaches to achieving commercial fusion energy, which is generally categorized by the way they confine the plasma to create the conditions for fusion.
Magnetic confinement fusion is historically the most researched approach to fusion, wrestling a fusion plasma into a confined shape using powerful superconducting magnets such as those used in MRI machines and particle accelerators. The tokamak reactor approach is pursued by the largest public fusion research project, ITER, and the US$2 billion funded private fusion company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
However, alternative approaches to achieving fusion energy have recently gained commercial interest. Laser-driven inertial confinement uses powerful pulsed laser systems and microscopic capsules of fuel to achieve fusion, and in 2022, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) of the USA marked a historical milestone in generating more energy from a fusion reaction than was directly supplied to it - although the energy balance is still far from positive overall. Catalyzed by this success, private companies pursuing a laser-driven fusion approach have raised over US$600 million collectively and plan to drastically improve upon the technology developed by the NIF.
Commercially, at least seven major approaches to fusion have raised significant funding and show the potential to generate commercial energy in the next 20 years. IDTechEx's report analyzes each of these through a quantitative benchmarking scheme across six commercially relevant metrics and summarizes the leading startups and projects driving each approach.
Approaches to commercial fusion are categorized by the confinement mechanism of the fusion reactor. Source: IDTechEx.
Is fusion still "always 30 years away"?
The decade ahead will be a pivotal time for the fusion industry, with many leading startups aiming to bring fusion power to the grid by 2035. However, achieving these goals will require significantly more funding, a robust supply chain, and the formation of suitable regulations for fusion power.
Most fusion players seek to de-risk their approach by first building one or more demonstrator facilities, which either validate the enabling technologies (e.g., magnet arrays or lasers), or achieve significant fusion milestones to generate commercial energy. Investors, scientists, and governments alike will be scrutinizing the results from these interim facilities closely to ascertain which startups can stick to their ambitious roadmaps.
The IDTechEx report "Fusion Energy Market 2025-2045: Technologies, Players, Timelines" contains a set of detailed 20-year timelines discussing the deployment of different fusion approaches, their fuels, and the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of fusion. These timelines and narratives are drawn from extensive research of the commercial fusion industry, including primary information from leading fusion startups and international fusion conferences.
Materials opportunities and supply chain challenges for fusion are also explored in depth, including their fuels, breeder blankets, superconductors, first wall materials, and more. Drawing on the wide technical expertise of IDTechEx, the demand for certain critical materials in fusion is also discussed, along with potential challenges and opportunities in their supply and demand.
For more information about this report, including downloadable sample pages, please see www.IDTechEx.com/Fusion.
For the full portfolio of energy and decarbonization market research available from IDTechEx, please visit www.IDTechEx.com/Research/Energy.
About IDTechEx
IDTechEx provides trusted independent research on emerging technologies and their markets. Since 1999, we have been helping our clients to understand new technologies, their supply chains, market requirements, opportunities and forecasts. For more information, contact research@IDTechEx.com or visit www.IDTechEx.com.
