Proxima Fusion will secure an in-house source of a core reactor component by building a €140 million factory to produce fusion-grade high-temperature superconducting tape, the company said. The plant will supply the startup’s demonstration reactor and its planned commercial machine, giving Proxima direct control over a material that drives its magnetic confinement design.
The Germany-based startup plans to fund the factory with a mix of public and private capital, including a €21 million contribution from the state of Lower Saxony. The investment follows a funding round months earlier that raised €411 million, a cash infusion that elevated Proxima among the best-funded fusion startups.
Proxima expects its demonstration plant to require 20,000 kilometres of HTS tape, and says a full commercial power station would need twice that amount. Today, most of the world’s HTS tape supply comes from manufacturers in China and Japan, a concentration that has shaped procurement and cost for the emerging fusion industry.
High-temperature superconducting tape became widely used by the current generation of fusion projects a little over a decade ago, because it can produce strong magnetic fields while operating at higher temperatures than low-temperature superconductors. That property allows reactor designs to be smaller and more efficient, which is central to many startups’ commercial strategies.
Demand for HTS tape is not limited to fusion. Companies such as Veir are deploying the material to increase efficiency and power density in data centres, creating competition for production capacity as fusion moves toward demonstration and commercialisation.
By manufacturing its own HTS tape, Proxima aims to ensure a steady supply for its machines and to insulate its development timeline from external bottlenecks in Asia-dominated production. The company says it will complete the project with public and private funding, but it has not published a target completion date.
The factory shifts where a crucial fusion ingredient will be produced and signals a move by a European startup to internalise critical supply chains as it transitions from prototype to commercial ambitions.
