Helion Energy raises $465M Series G to build world's first fusion power plant for Microsoft by 2028

Speaker 1: a mafia episode.

Speaker 2: They should. That would be a lot of fun. Or a poker match. They should do a they should do a world series of poker because poker is very popular over there. Anyway, we have David Kirtley from Helion Energy. He's the founder and CEO. David, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

Speaker 9: Hi there. Thank you for having me today.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much for taking the time. Long Long overdue. I think most people will be familiar. But how are you describing the shape of the business these days? How you got here? How long it's taken? What the current milestones are. Take us through the intro.

Speaker 9: Awesome. Thank you. So I am Dave Kirtley, CEO of Helion Energy and we build fusion. So what we're announcing actually last week was that we raised a Series G, a $465,000,000 round.

Speaker 2: Hey, John.

Speaker 1: Sorry to interrupt.

Speaker 2: Fantastic.

Speaker 9: Awesome. Yeah. And and that's the key building. So, we've built now our seventh generation system called Polaris that does fusion here in Washington State. And then this allows us to keep moving, beginning construction of our eighth generation system. This is for a power plant for Microsoft that use fusion energy.

Speaker 2: Cool.

Speaker 9: And then expand manufacturing. We wanna, the the key to how do you build fusion fast is you is you gotta build the hardware. And so we spend a lot of time focusing on manufacturing and investing in that. And so we're 60 x ing our manufacturing line that produces the electronics and the capacitors and the modules for fusion right now.

Speaker 2: Give us the fusion one zero one, the different paths that you could have gone down and then the technology that you chose because it is different than I think what some people have seen other fusion companies working on your particular strategy. So walk us through it.

Speaker 9: Sure. So, fusion energy is what powers the universe. That's what happens in stars and supernova. And, but we don't really use it here on Earth except more really in academic and national lab settings for the most part. So our goal at Helion and my personal goal is I wanted to solve the energy crisis and bring that universe power to Earth. And in fusion, what you're doing is you're taking lightweight isotopes, hydrogens and heliums, things that are found everywhere, and then at pretty extreme conditions, literally thousands of atmospheres and hundreds of millions of degrees. You force those together, they fuse, form heavier elements and electricity. The problem is is that what we see most folks in fusion, in fact, in my career do, is do all that to generate heat, to run steam turbines, to run cooling cycles, and all the other things that we we normally do for power. And at Alien, our goal was can we do something a little bit different? Mhmm. Can we directly harness the magnetic and electric energy from that reaction at really high efficiencies, to to get and extract electricity and then sell it. And so that's what we set out to do. We've built now seven generation of machines that do that direct electricity extraction and then show that you can do fusion.

Speaker 2: So talk about the road to q greater than one, Q engineering greater than one, all the Mhmm. All the different milestones that it's interesting. You have a you have such a in in Fusion, you have such a solid like ground truth for your KPI that is very different for other businesses. It really is like there's scientific milestones and it's very measurable. The energy that goes into the system must be less than the energy that comes out. But talk about that path where you are today, where you need to be in 2030 to meet your goals.

Speaker 9: Yeah. And I think that there is actually some room to talk about that ground truth in terms of what you need for the business. Because our goal in at Healian anyway, is not to focus only on those scientific milestones, but to do it in a way that makes electricity. Yeah. And so, that's actually something we sent out that's different about Healian Yeah. From the beginning is extracting electricity directly, getting that out to the grid, and then showing that you could do that at really high efficiency. If you can extract electricity at 95% electricity, now the fusion just has to do that little bit. Yeah. And so the systems can be smaller, faster, and easier. And so that's what we proved to do. So we've we've set out to do. So we built now seven generations of system of systems, set world records for plasma temperatures, plasma plasma plasma pressure, plasma energy, and then and then also showed we could do some of the electricity piece of extracting electricity from it. So we're running our seventh generation system Polaris right now. Its goal is to show you can make that electricity and make electricity from fusion so you can go out and build those power plants with it.

Speaker 1: How big is the system?

Speaker 2: I was gonna ask about size. Yeah. I I mean, we've seen small fusion reactor companies that are making effectively like a battery that could go in a vehicle or spacecraft. Obviously there's, you know, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor that everyone knows. But where do you sit? Did you wind up in that particular position? And then what's the strategy if demand winds up being one megawatt? I come to you and I say, I want 10 megawatts in one facility. How do you meet that demand? Or do you just sit it out?

Speaker 9: Yeah. So our goal for Microsoft, the PPA, the power purchase agreement we have with them, is to build a 50 MW facility. So that's industrial scale power. It's not your house. Yep. But it is not large scale data centers.

Speaker 2: It's actually my house. I I need 50 MW personally. But speak for yourself. No.

Speaker 1: What are you doing?

Speaker 2: I'm training I'm training models for myself. I got to do it.

Speaker 1: Sovereign Household Sovereign AI was very, you know, 2025, 2026. Household AI is the new wave.

Speaker 2: So 50 megawatts at one You're gonna need

Speaker 9: juice to do that.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Mhmm. You're gonna need some helium. So so is it one system, a series of systems, racks? Like, how how do you how do you think about industrializing that capacity?

Speaker 9: It gets to the thesis of the business. Mhmm. What I tell the team is that if we're the first to build a fusion power plant and that's all we do, then we've totally failed as a business.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 9: That our goal is to build systems that are deployed globally at scale.

Speaker 6: Mhmm.

Speaker 9: Fusion can do it and we need to make that happen. And so, of that is building systems that are modular and scalable and deployable. And so, the vision is that you're building a 50 megawatt scale generator, each one on that scale at our facility, Gigafactory is a fusion production that then can be put on a truck, delivered to the site, plugged in and run. And if you need 500 megawatts, you put in 10 of them or 12 of them so you have some redundancy. And then and then you can scale from there. And so, you think about that in that modular building piece. Well, I like how we think about data centers and breaking those into those modular pieces that you can then mass produce and then deploy at scale and deploy them quickly. And so that that's what we focused on doing, even to the point of being annoying where, even for our seventh generation system, we built it at our parts in our factory, put them on a truck, drove them down the street and well, really in the parking lot

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 9: And then plugged them in to go get Polaris assembled. And so keeping that same philosophy of mass production and reliability and and scale so you can lower costs and timelines is really important.

Speaker 2: So what is the what is the capacity of a single system these days? 50 megawatts. 50 megawatts and we'll then you chain them together to get to bigger numbers for particular projects. Got it.

Speaker 9: With Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sorry. Please.

Speaker 9: I was say gonna with the technology we have now, there's some fundamental physics limitations for fusion of trying to scale it down and scale. Yeah. And so so our goal is is is smaller scale if we can get there, but fusion scales to the big scale easy.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That's great. What are your timelines around the number eight, the PPA with Microsoft, all that kind of thing? Because we a lot of the nuclear founders that we've had on, everything's really exciting. It feels like it's happening. And then you you ask about the timeline and it's This 20. Yeah. 2034. Yeah. And you guys have been making, you know, very incremental progress and but I'm curious how you think about it.

Speaker 9: Yeah. So our goal for the Microsoft program is is to have our power plant out there built in 2028 and start early operations and then scale that up from there. The key to that is a couple of key things is getting started early. It's been now a couple of years that we've been working on that power plant facility. And I think you you point to some of the the challenges in nuclear industry around regulatory and permitting. So that's one thing that fusion shines is that we've been able to get out go out and actually get all the permits. The environmental permits were granted last year. We broke ground on actual power plant last year, and now built two buildings on the site and are building the third, and starting this year on that that power infrastructure. And so that's really exciting to be able to go get that hardware in the ground, get built, and then and then here in Everett behind me actually in the factory start building some of those early prototypes and components for Orion itself. And so that's what we're working on, all of that in parallel. It's a little crazy, but the world needs it and we got to get it out there quick.

Speaker 5: It's happening.

Speaker 2: What's the regulatory side of business look like? Do you need to get something that we tested a dome like we we're more familiar with like the the the fission side of the business which makes a ton of sense when someone's creating a new nuclear reactor. Like them to test it in a remote location under a dome in case it explodes. But there's a very different set of risks here. I don't know that there's anywhere near as many. But there's still probably some oversight. So what does that look like?

Speaker 9: So, when we founded Helion, it was something I was really worried about because there wasn't a really clear regulatory framework. And white space is good in a lot of engineering and science but it's not great in regulatory and policy. And so, we spent a lot of work on that. But, the good news is a year and a half ago, we got a law passed called the Advance Act, which very solidly, by going through the real technical rigor of what are the risks of fusion, the nuclear regulatory agency made the determination and then and then we got a law passed to support that, that the nuclear regulatory agency does not need to regulate fusion. In fact, it's regulated by the states, by the Department of Health. So, we're regulated like a particle accelerator in a hospital.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 9: It's still serious and it's still industrial scale with lots of licensing and regulatory work. But the timeline is now on the order of a year or less rather than a decade. And so that's that's the big difference. And it comes to a lot of the safety cases of why fusion is just fundamentally different.

Speaker 2: And in general, if I tour Helion's facilities, there's probably no radioactive material anywhere on-site. Is that roughly correct? Because you're not using plutonium or uranium?

Speaker 9: So we're definitely not using plutonium or uranium. The systems can't melt down, go critical or any of those kinds of things. But it is still an atomic process, what happens in the sun and what what we build here on earth. And so, do have to consider, just like in a hospital and a particle accelerator in a hospital, the radioactive materials. And there are created and we spend a lot of work making sure we can handle those. And so, we've been licensed and regulated by the state to be able to handle those

Speaker 2: Got it.

Speaker 9: In that similar way for a number of years now. And so, we spend a lot of time and have a big team that does it to make sure that we're handling this safely in a way that, you know, the public can believe in and trust. It's Very really important that you do that and you talk about those things.

Speaker 2: Well, glad you have more funding to work on it and Yeah. It's I'm very

Speaker 1: And the timeline is very exciting. Yeah. I am. I'm now thinking about the opportunity to do the first fusion powered podcast on on-site when you when you guys when you and Microsoft we might have to call in a favor with Satya and say, hey, can we siphon off?

Speaker 6: Can we

Speaker 2: borrow it?

Speaker 1: Can we borrow a little a little juice? But really impressive progress and and excited to follow along.

Speaker 2: Have a great rest of your day.

Speaker 1: Congrats to the team.

Speaker 2: To you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Let's go over to the retail corner presented by public of course. Matthew Zeitlin says, the idea that SpaceX is being quote dumped on retail is a little silly. Retail almost certainly wants to buy like 10 x of whatever is possible. He said, I'm just not moved by the index fund stuff. The index funds own the stock markets. It's basically part of the stock market. Are you gonna do? Go find a way to neutralize your exposure if you're so mad about it. That's a good point. With the public, you could create the S and P four ninety nine if you want. But

Speaker 1: Well, SpaceX isn't gonna be in the S and P.

Speaker 2: I think they will be.

Speaker 1: No. They're the one they're the one index that pushed back.

Speaker 2: I think that the profitability hurdle has been has been met because of the new Google deal. I think that SpaceX, Oh, when they go public is that new in

Speaker 1: the last think this is new.

Speaker 2: I think that Google is now buying about $1,000,000,000 a month of compute from SpaceX. And between that between the Google deal and the Anthropic deal and probably lower burn from just things generally because you're going out and you want to make sure that you're in the fighting in fighting form. I would expect to see a profitable quarter very quickly to that will lead to Okay. Indexing deal.

Speaker 1: Not like five days.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Probably not five days but I would probably say within the first year it's possible. And S and P four ninety nine is just is just an idea. There's other indices that it matters.

Speaker 1: Can't can't the S and P just look at Goldman's estimate that they're gonna have 470,000,000,000 in 2030?

Speaker 2: Good point.

Speaker 1: Can't they just lean on that?

Speaker 2: They could. No. They actually can't because it's in their rules that you have to be actually GAAP profitable. But Elon is marshaling the profits from a variety of companies that have money to pay. But I but I take issue with this with this question of retail almost certainly wants to buy like 10 x or whatever's available. There's so much available. It's not some low float, oh, it's GameStop and like a bunch of mean traders can fire it up. Like this is $60,000,000,000. Like I don't know that retail can deploy what 10 x that? $600,000,000,000 is coming out of retail like Robinhood accounts? Are you kidding me? Like, no. I like like I don't know that that's the I don't think that the like maybe maybe what happens is the indexes come in and they anchor and then there's employee lockups and then Elon's not selling. So the effective float is low enough that retail is actually fighting for shares and moving the price and they are the marginal trader, which would be the biggest win ever because then you can move the retail army off of talking about the moon and Mars and all the long term stuff as opposed to having a bunch of financial investors that are like, what have you done for me lately? What's going on this quarter? Which is not where that business wants to be. So I don't know. Chad's predicting a bloodbath for retail. We'll see. I don't know. Yeah, subtract my $135 from 60,000,000,000. It's a lot. I still don't, I'm not putting in the dumping on retail. I'm just saying that like I think that Matthew, friend of the show, love him, but I don't fully buy that if the retail allocation is 10,000,000,000, that there's a 100,000,000,000 of demand just because it's such a big number One thing I will say I don't know. We'll see.

Speaker 1: It's hard to find a bear that's actually willing to short it.

Speaker 2: That's a great point. That is a fantastic point. It is a very very dangerous proposition. Wait. Is this true? No. This is a joke. Morgan Barrett is joking around, has a screenshot of Erawan advertising the SpaceX IPO. SpaceX IPO access is in the Erawan rewards. I know this is a joke because Jordy would have told me if it was real because he's in that app. Five times a day his screen time it's like Erawan and then x then Messages. Text Yeah. But Erawan's at the top. No.

Speaker 1: Messages. Pull up this post from Cosmos and then we'll go to our next guest. Yes. Can Cosmos is saying, hey Siri, find me a trademark lawyer. This is Andy If McEwen's you zoom in, you can

Speaker 2: see That's the same logo.

Speaker 1: It's the exact same logo. And I do know that Andy does in fact have trademark on this design.

Speaker 2: Wait. So so that is the new Siri loading icon?

Speaker 6: Or

Speaker 2: is that just this app is loading actively? I don't know. This is this is an odd odd demo. At the same time, it's six dots. I don't know. It's six dots like it's

Speaker 1: Your honor, it's six dots.

Speaker 2: It's six dots. Like, can you just can you

Speaker 1: just It's also potentially a different

Speaker 2: a square or I I can I'm the only one that can use a circle.

Speaker 1: Cosmos is like a more more from my understanding more like a Pinterest competitor. Okay. It could be a different enough category that

Speaker 2: Well, Apple also used a Pinterest style dual feed layout in one of their app designs. So, you know, maybe they're ruffling feathers all over the tech industry today but probably giving consumers what they want, so we'll see. Juror comes on and says, like the six dots on my Siri. I'm happy. I was upset about Apple Intelligence.