Fusion startup Zap Energy adds nuclear fission reactors to address near-term energy demand

Fusion startup Zap Energy has announced a partial pivot to develop small nuclear fission reactors alongside its ongoing fusion research, a move driven by surging electricity demand from artificial intelligence data centers. The company is among the best-funded fusion startups, having raised more than $300 million. Zap Energy's new chief executive, Zabrina Johal, told TechCrunch that fission and fusion are "two sides of the same coin" and share many congruent challenges. She pointed to rising energy demand from AI data centers, which is expected to nearly triple by 2030, as a key reason for the decision. Johal said there is not enough power and energy in the world to build all the data centers that are needed, adding that the company needed to get something relevant to the grid on a faster timeline because grid-ready fusion power plants remain years away, likely a decade or more. Fusion experiments have produced more energy than the reaction needed to ignite, but no experiment has approached the scale required for a commercial power plant. While fission, the practice of splitting heavy atoms like uranium to produce power, has been a commercial technology since the 1950s, building new fission reactors cost-effectively remains difficult. Fission startups building small modular reactors are counting on mass manufacturing to bring costs down, though those benefits can take around a decade to materialize. Johal said Zap Energy expects to start generating revenue from the new fission business within a year, drawing on federal programs from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, as well as milestone payments and reserved production capacity from companies that need large amounts of electricity. The company is modeling its financing partly on the customer co-investment program used by semiconductor equipment maker ASML, in which manufacturers effectively underwrote research and development in exchange for reserved production capacity once the machines entered production. Zap Energy's reactor will be based on the 4S, a molten salt-cooled design jointly developed by Toshiba and Japan's power industry research institute but never built. Johal said the design comes with no intellectual property entanglement. She expects there will be enough demand in the 2030s for Zap to find customers even though it is years behind other fission startups.