Google enters €400 million funding round for German startup, heating up the race for nuclear fusion.

With artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers exponentially increasing the demand for energy, preferably clean energy, Google is reinforcing its investments in nuclear energy by supporting a German startup that aims to make nuclear fusion viable by 2030.

Big tech was a strategic investor in Proxima Fusion's €400 million funding round. The deal, led by XTX Ventures, the venture capital arm of XTX Markets, one of the world's leading quantitative trading companies, valued the startup at €2.4 billion.

This is Google's first investment in a European nuclear fusion company, a technology that has been attracting the interest of major investors in the technology sector and the financial market because it is considered a potentially high-impact energy solution.

Nuclear fusion is a process that joins light atoms, such as hydrogen atoms, releasing a huge amount of energy. It is the same process that occurs in the Sun and, compared to nuclear fission—used in current power plants, which generates energy by splitting atoms—it produces less radioactive waste, presents a lower risk of serious accidents, and does not emit pollutants like coal and gas.

Making this technology commercially viable, however, has been a complex task. To date, no private company has been able to demonstrate that nuclear fusion can generate more energy than is consumed to heat the fuel.

But the advances made in recent years, coupled with the increased demand for energy from data centers , driven by AI and the growth in the volume of data processed, have led major players in the technology and financial sectors to invest in making nuclear fusion a commercial reality.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, is one of the main investors in Helion, which raised $465 million in June in a round led by Thrive Capital, bringing its market value to $15.5 billion.

Last year, Bill Gates , Nvidia , and Google itself participated in Commonwealth Fusion Systems' $863 million funding round, which has already raised over $3 billion to make nuclear fusion commercially viable.

The topic of nuclear energy has been high on Google's agenda for some time. In 2024, the company signed the world's first corporate agreement to purchase energy from small nuclear reactors, committing to buy 500 megawatts of electricity generated by this technology in the United States.

Alphabet , its holding company, is also an investor in TAE Technologies, a pioneer in the development of nuclear fusion. Recently, the company merged with Trump Media & Technology Group in a stock-swap transaction, creating a company valued at $6 billion.

Part of this race, Proxima was created in 2023 from the Max Planck Institute for Physics, a non-profit organization. The company intends to build a €2 billion demonstration facility in Germany by the early 2030s to prove that its technology can generate energy in a commercially viable way.

In an interview with the Financial Times (FT) , Proxima CEO Francesco Sciortino stated that Google has expressed interest in purchasing energy from the power plant the startup plans to build, as it is "looking for everything" to secure "as much energy as possible" to power its data centers.