Fusion’s private sector in Europe has shifted from small research teams into fast-scaling industrial operations within a single year, as funding, hiring and public financing have all accelerated sharply across the continent.
Companies building lasers, magnets and reactor components say the past 12 months mark a turning point after years spent proving the underlying physics. Staff numbers have tripled at some firms, funding rounds have grown far larger and governments have begun committing hundreds of millions of euros to the supply chain behind the technology.
“Last year in September, we were 60 to 65 people. Today, we’re above 200, nearly 240, and we have 60 open jobs,” said Guenter Kraft, chief communications and government affairs officer of Focused Energy.
“The public financing is falling into place. The private financing is coming in as well. The partnerships, both on the public and the private side, are there,” said Lucio Milanese, co-founder and chief external affairs officer of Proxima Fusion. “Now we just need to deliver.”
Milanese said Proxima’s funding more than tripled over the past year, backed by a €400 million financing deal with Bavaria for its Alpha demonstrator.
Proxima also secured further German federal funding and signed a separate agreement with utility RWE. Germany’s Hubs for Fusion program is separately distributing an initial €125 million across three centers covering magnetic confinement, laser fusion and fuel-cycle research, further evidence of the country’s fast-moving public support.
Saskia Horsch, director of corporate affairs at Marvel Fusion, said construction began on the company’s US technology demonstrator this year.
Sam Guilaume, chief executive officer of Renaissance Fusion, described the shift toward supply chain work as evidence of an industry maturing beyond pure science. He said the company’s focus on materials expertise, including high-temperature superconductor (HTS) tape and liquid lithium, will combine with engineering and fusion-company collaboration to deliver simplified reactor designs.
“We are living in a Darwinian era to some extent. Access to capital has evolved, access to policies has evolved, and we need to adapt,” he said.
Peter Roos, chief executive officer of Novatron Fusion Group, said political engagement in the Nordic region has grown quickly this year.
Securing the supply chain
The panel discussion took place at the UK Fusion Forum 2026 on September 15 in London, organized by the Fusion Industry Association. Melanie Windridge, founder and director of Fusion Energy Insights, moderated the session, which focused on how private fusion developers in Europe are bringing their technology to market.
Kraft said most fusion technology, whether magnetic or laser-based, already originates in Europe, calling the sector the continent’s next major industrial opportunity beyond energy alone.
“This whole thing is a sovereignty game, a geopolitical game and an industrial game-changer for Europeans,” he said. “We have to make a decision: is it China or is it the Western world?”
Milanese said Europe is already 80% to 90% of the way toward manufacturing all the components needed for a stellarator-based demonstrator domestically, thanks partly to industrial capacity built around the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) project. The main remaining gaps are in HTS tape manufacturing, concentrated in Asia, and in tritium enrichment, he said.
“We just signed last week a memorandum of understanding with the government of Saxony for an investment of €140 million in the first large-scale manufacturing plant for fusion-grade HTS tape,” he said.
Horsch said sovereignty does not mean total self-sufficiency, since interdependencies are unavoidable in a globally connected world.
“Sovereignty really means making sure that we have control of the critical technologies here, that we know how to build them, keep the know-how here, build the industrial capability and then start to export,” she said.
Kraft said the sector’s next challenge is industrializing production at a scale the optics industry has never attempted, comparing today’s methods to building a satellite by hand.
“We need 1,000 lasers. We need to build gigafactories for laser production. This is the goal,” he said.
Focused Energy spent three years negotiating with RWE to convert a former fission site into a fusion site, a deal that has drawn other utilities’ attention to fusion startups and served as a signal that helped move the wider industry forward.
Milanese said European utilities have historically been less willing than American counterparts to embrace fusion, though RWE’s move has shifted that, he said.
Roos said he expects more utility deals in the coming years, in a different form than seen in the US.
Investors want returns
Horsch said effective de-risking requires two things: a predictable regulatory path kept separate from fission rules that does not overregulate before the sector’s risk profile is understood, and co-funding mechanisms that let private investors back a facility with some prospect of return rather than a pure science project.
“A private investor will not invest in a science project, but a private investor will invest in a facility that will have some sort of return on investment at the end. It does not need to be the final machine,” she said.
She pointed to demonstration facilities with a university-style user model as one option, with the state acting as co-investor. Horsch said Germany has made a good start, and that she hopes the European Union’s forthcoming fusion strategy reflects similar ideas.
Panelists said governments could do more to clarify how public money will support the sector. Milanese said the UK has tremendous potential in talent and stability for business, pointing to its £2.5 billion fusion funding commitment as one example where clarity is still needed.
“We would need, as a private sector, clarity on what the UK really intends to do engaging with the private sector with the funding that is being allocated,” he said.
He said clarity on how the money is spent, whether on factories or financing, could boost cross-Channel collaboration.
Kraft said fusion cannot be solved by any single country, noting that Focused Energy employs people from 40 different nations across its sites.
“Fusion will only happen if we look across the borders, and this is something where the UK should look into Europe and not just inside it,” he said.
Horsch pointed to Marvel Fusion’s partnership with Colorado State University as a model that could work in the UK too.
Guilaume said the UK’s policymaking and public funding commitments have already sent a positive signal likely to be followed elsewhere in Europe, pointing to similar momentum building in France.
The five companies represent different bets on how fusion reaches the grid, with shared testing facilities and transatlantic supply chain cooperation cited as needs across the sector. Novatron’s mirror-machine design addresses the plasma-leakage and stability problems that pushed the approach out of favor relative to tokamaks in the 1980s.
Renaissance Fusion is pursuing magnetic confinement built around a simplified stellarator design, with a fully operational pilot line producing HTS tape and liquid lithium, both targeted for production at scale by 2028.
Horsch said Marvel Fusion’s laser-driven approach builds on the achievements of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), pairing high-gain targets with high-performance lasers and a simplified fuel cycle developed alongside power plant partner Siemens Energy. She said the company used the past year to deepen those industrial partnerships as it moves toward commercial deployment.
With funding, staff numbers and government commitments now moving together, the panelists said the industry’s next test is turning that momentum into reactors connected to the grid.