Unlocking the next source of US energy dominance
Conner Prochaska is the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), an agency within the US Department of Energy. This essay is part of the 2026 Global Energy Agenda.
As the global economy develops and the US industrial base expands, demand for energy continues to grow at the fastest rate in a generation. In 2024, the US economy consumed 4,157 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. The expansion of data centers’ capacity for compute is key to this transformation.
Analysts predict that global demand for power for data centers could double by 2030, totaling 945 TWh—more electricity than Japan consumes in a year. In the United States, data centers could soon use 10 percent of the country’s electricity, up from the current rate of 4.4 percent, and could account for half of the growth in American demand for electricity between now and 2028. Data centers’ power consumption drives investment into the grid and enables research that unleashes new ways to generate, transmit, and store energy.
To make power more affordable, propel technological progress, and fuel economic growth, the world needs more energy—and thanks to US leadership, it’s getting closer to meeting this need with fusion.
Driving energy innovation
The mission of the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E) is to ensure that America leads in energy—not just as an exporter, but as an innovator in how we make, distribute, and use it. Our results reflect this commitment.
Since 2009, ARPA-E has allocated $4.2 billion in research and development funding across 1,700 projects. Nearly 270 of these projects have attracted more than $15.2 billion in private sector follow-on funding.1The “follow-on funding” value includes any commercial funding committed or received from other sources after the effective date of the ARPA-E award. Thirty-six ARPA-E-supported companies have attained valuations totaling $22.3 billion.2The total enterprise valuation number for public listing transactions, acquisitions, and company sales is reported separately from the “follow-on funding” number. This “acquired, merged, and made an IPO” number includes development capital and equity valuation minus cash on hand. In the past year, ARPA-E has stewarded $180 million to launch the Department of Energy’s first projects in applied quantum informatics, advance processing of used nuclear fuel, pioneer superhot geothermal systems, design superior permanent magnets, validate industrial catalysts and characterize deposits of critical minerals exponentially faster than industry currently is able to, and develop novel materials for fusion power plants.
Realizing fusion’s potential
ARPA-E considers harnessing fusion as an energy source as one of the most consequential achievements the energy industry has yet to accomplish. Fusion, the atomic process that powers the sun, has astonishing energy density: A deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion power plant has an energy density of 340 million megajoules per kilogram, which is 4.3 times greater than that of uranium-235, the fuel used in nuclear power plants, 6.2 million times greater than the energy density of natural gas, and twelve million times greater than coal. One gram of DT fuel has the energy equivalent of 320 billion BTUs of natural gas.
When ARPA-E entered the fusion discussion, the scientific understanding of the technology’s challenges was mature, but the ability to instantiate it through engineering was not yet viable. This discrepancy delayed investment and deployment. We wanted to de-risk methods, prove performance, and attract private capital to drive progress. Though there is still much to be done, ARPA-E’s fusion portfolio has already delivered results.
In 2014, there were twelve commercial firms dedicated to fielding fusion power. Six of these were based in the United States and had raised $382 million. Today, there are over forty-five firms pursuing fusion, most of which began operations after 2017, and they are backed by $10 billion in investment. Twenty-five of these are American and have garnered 70 percent of the $10 billion the industry has raised thus far.
From analysis to action
What happened between 2014 and now that supercharged the fusion industry?
ARPA-E catalyzed the commercial fusion industry.
Before 2014, ARPA-E had never funded research into fusion energy. The prevailing view was that fusion was only suitable for “big science.” ARPA-E challenged that assumption and asked: Are there new or existing approaches that warrant revisiting that could now work with private investment? The resounding answer: “Yes!”
In 2014, ARPA-E accelerated the US fusion industry by launching the ALPHA (Accelerating Low-cost Plasma Heating and Assembly) program. ALPHA focused on new pathways, with lower capital expenditure, to achieve fusion power. At the time, fusion research focused on two approaches to confining plasmas, which is the technology’s key challenge. One approach is magnetic confinement, which uses magnetic fields and lower-than-air ion densities. The other is inertial confinement, which uses heating and compression and involves greater-than-solid densities. ALPHA focused on densities in between these two approaches and opened the door to magneto-inertial fusion. From this advance came three more programs, each developing new concepts, materials, and technologies that turn scientific analysis into engineering action.
Our latest fusion program, known as CHADWICK, is developing novel materials for the first wall of a fusion reactor—a barrier that must survive forty years in temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. ALPHA kick-started the industry, and CHADWICK is solving the problems that the industry will soon confront.
Fusion’s promise of abundant power demands action and ARPA-E is ready to take it.
Since 2014, ARPA-E has invested $134 million in fusion and spurred $1.5 billion in private investment. Over the next eighteen months, ARPA-E will invest $135 million to supercharge the development of secure supply chains and technologies for fusion’s imminent deployment.
The world needs more power, and the United States will deliver it.
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Image: A color-enhanced image of the inside of the preamplifier support structure within DOE's National Ignition Facility, located at the National Nuclear Security Administration's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. (Photo: Damien Jemison)