Google Pours Money Into German Fusion Startup Racing to Build Europe's First Power Plant

Google is doubling down on nuclear fusion, and this time its money is going to Europe. The company has signed on as a strategic investor in Proxima Fusion, a Germany-based startup that just closed a 411 million euro ($468 million) funding round and wants to build the continent's first commercial fusion power plant.

The round, announced Tuesday, pushes Proxima's valuation to $2.7 billion. It was led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures, with utility giant RWE joining Google as a strategic backer. A cluster of venture firms — Plural, UVC Partners, Balderton and Cherry Ventures — also chipped in.

Fusion is the process of fusing two hydrogen atoms into a single helium atom, a reaction that throws off enormous amounts of energy without the radioactive waste problems tied to today's nuclear plants, which all rely on fission — splitting atoms apart rather than joining them. It's the reaction that powers the sun, and for decades it has been the physics world's most tantalizing "almost there" technology. Nobody has managed to turn it into a working commercial power source yet, and the industry is still grinding through serious engineering hurdles to get there.

That hasn't stopped Google from betting on it as a long-term answer to the world's appetite for carbon-free, always-on electricity. Proxima describes the investment as confirmation of that continued interest.

What Proxima is actually building

Proxima is working on stellarator technology, one of several competing designs for containing the superheated plasma needed for a fusion reaction. The company's near-term goal is a fusion demonstrator, essentially a proof-of-concept machine that comes before an actual commercial plant, which it's targeting for the early 2030s. The commercial power plant itself is aimed at sometime later that decade.

The fresh capital is earmarked for scaling up production of high-temperature superconducting cable and magnets, both critical components in stellarator systems, along with building out the engineering and manufacturing infrastructure needed to actually construct one. Proxima also said it plans to hire across engineering, manufacturing and operations to keep the timeline moving.

Francesco Sciortino, Proxima's cofounder and CEO, framed the round as validation for European deep tech more broadly. "Europe is racing with the United States and China to get to the first fusion power plant," he said in a statement, adding that Proxima's financing "demonstrates that Europe can not only invent breakthrough technologies, but also build globally competitive companies around them." He said investors are backing the company because they recognize "both the urgency and the opportunity" in what he called a generational energy technology.

Europe's best-funded fusion bet, but still behind the US

Proxima is now the most well-capitalized fusion startup in Europe, and it isn't particularly close. But zoom out to the global picture and American companies are still playing in a different league financially.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised $863 million last August, bringing its total funding to $2.9 billion, according to Dealroom. Helion Energy, backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, raised $465 million last month and has pulled in $1.5 billion overall.

Google's fingerprints are on both sides of the Atlantic here. The company is also an investor in Commonwealth Fusion Systems and signed an offtake agreement with it in June 2025, meaning Google has committed to buying power once CFS gets a commercial plant running. At the time, Google wrote in a blog post that fusion is "clean, abundant and inherently safe, and it can be built just about anywhere," while cautioning that turning the science into a working business is "immensely challenging, and success is not guaranteed."

That caveat is worth sitting with. Fusion has a long history of timelines slipping and costs ballooning, and no company anywhere has generated commercial electricity from the reaction. What's changed recently is the sheer volume of capital chasing the problem, from tech giants with enormous power needs of their own to sovereign-minded investors treating fusion as a strategic industrial race between the US, Europe and China.

For Google specifically, the calculus looks less like a moonshot bet and more like insurance against its own future electricity demand. As AI data centers push power consumption higher, the company has been stacking bets across the energy landscape, and fusion, however distant, represents a shot at solving the problem at scale rather than incrementally.

Whether Proxima or its American rivals actually deliver a working plant by the 2030s remains an open question. But the money flowing in suggests the industry, and the companies underwriting it, believe the wait is worth the risk.