Google Bets on Fusion: Germany's Proxima Raises €411M at a €2.4B Valuation
With AI torching power prices, Google went and funded a fusion dream that won't light a bulb for another decade.
Three key facts
On July 7, German fusion startup Proxima Fusion announced a €411 million (about $468 million) raise at a €2.4 billion valuation, making it Europe's best-funded fusion company. The round was led by XTX Ventures — the venture arm of algorithmic-trading giant XTX Markets — and London's East X Ventures, with Alphabet's Google and German energy major RWE participating. Bloomberg and CNBC call it the largest fusion financing in European history.
Proxima is chasing the "stellarator" design rather than the more mainstream tokamak. RWE put in €25 million and signed an agreement to help build Europe's first stellarator fusion plant on the site of a decommissioned fission station in Gundremmingen, Bavaria. Reusing an old nuclear plant's land and grid connections for a new fusion reactor is a shrewd bit of accounting.
The company is only three years old. Reaching a €2.4 billion valuation since 2023 rests on one timeline: grid power "in the 2030s." Note — the 2030s, not next year.
WangDou's Take
Start with the irony: Google was just reported to have pushed its own electricity use up 37% via AI data centers — and now it's writing checks for fusion. That's no coincidence. The AI power tiger's appetite has grown so large that tech giants are betting on energy still stuck in the lab. Fusion is a gorgeous pie in the sky: clean, near-limitless, fueled by deuterium from seawater. The catch is that "the 2030s" is a promise the fusion industry has made for half a century — every year it's "another 30 years." Picking a stellarator over a tokamak is steadier physics but far harder engineering, i.e. the steeper trail up the mountain. RWE's €25 million is the honest money here — it doesn't want fusion power so much as it wants that retired plant's land not sitting idle and its grid hookup not wasted. And Google's few hundred million euros? For a company with hundreds of billions in annual revenue, that's a lottery ticket: win and it's fame plus fortune; lose and it bought a "we're finding clean energy for AI" PR story.