The tech industry has a rather inconvenient and very large secret. Every time you ask a generative AI to write a poem, design an image, or summarise a document, you are spinning up a process that is astonishingly power-hungry. We are building a future on a technology that requires an ever-growing supply of electricity, and frankly, our current grid isn’t built for it. The paradox is almost poetic: the very tool promising to solve our greatest challenges is creating a colossal one of its own.
But what if the solution to AI’s energy gluttony also involves, well, AI? It sounds like a recursive loop, but tucked away in laboratories around the world, a different kind of AI in fusion energy research is quietly brewing. This isn’t about generating text; it’s about generating a star on Earth. And as our digital ambitions run headfirst into our physical energy limits, this moonshot is starting to look less like science fiction and more like a strategic necessity.
The Unseen Cost of Intelligence
Let’s be clear about the scale of the problem. We aren’t talking about a minor uptick in electricity usage. The computational power required for training and running large language models is immense. As reported by ABC News, citing industry analysis, the electricity demand just from AI data centres in a country like Australia is projected to skyrocket by 25% annually for the next decade. This isn’t a slow burn; it’s an exponential explosion in demand.
Globally, the picture is even starker. Bloomberg NEF has painted a grim forecast, estimating that by 2030, a staggering 83% of the a burgeoning demand from data centres will be met by fossil fuels. So, as we build our shiny, intelligent digital future, we are simultaneously digging ourselves deeper into a carbon-based past. This is happening just as developed nations are trying to decarbonise. In Australia, for instance, 16 coal-fired power plants are scheduled for retirement within the next ten years. You don’t need an advanced algorithm to see the collision course: demand is going up, and reliable, baseload supply is coming down. Solar and wind are fantastic, but they don’t solve the “always on” problem that data centres require. Something has to give.
Fusion: The Universe’s Power Source
This is where fusion energy enters the conversation. For decades, it has been the ultimate ‘just around the corner’ technology. Unlike nuclear fission, which splits heavy, unstable atoms (and creates long-lived radioactive waste), fusion does the opposite. It mimics the process that powers the sun, forcing light elements like hydrogen isotopes together under immense pressure and temperature until they fuse, releasing monumental amounts of energy. The fuel is abundant, the process produces no greenhouse gases, and the by-products are not the troublesome long-term waste of fission plants.
But if it’s so perfect, why don’t we have it already? The simple answer is that recreating the conditions inside the sun is extraordinarily difficult. We need to heat fuel to over 100 million degrees Celsius—many times hotter than the sun’s core—and contain this superheated state, known as plasma, long enough for fusion to occur. For years, the challenge of plasma control systems has been the primary barrier, the grand puzzle of this entire endeavour. This makes any progress in the field a cornerstone of renewable energy R&D.
The Unexpected Players in the Fusion Race
You might expect this research to be the exclusive domain of government labs and secretive state-run projects. And while that’s partly true, the new fusion race is being bankrolled by some surprising entities. Take Hostplus, an Australian superannuation fund that typically invests in property and shares. They’ve just made a $330 million bet on a US-based fusion company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), an MIT spin-off.
This isn’t just a punt; it’s a calculated, strategic investment in what Hostplus’s CIO, Sam Sicilia, calls, “the biggest potential change in the world’s energy mix that we have seen in our lifetime”. His fund’s investment secures a 4% stake in a company that is leading the charge on what is known as magnetic confinement fusion. This investment from a pension fund, of all places, signals a massive shift in perception. Fusion is moving from the lab to the balance sheet.
Australia itself is a fascinating microcosm of this global push. While the country has a long-standing nuclear moratorium, that hasn’t stopped local innovators. A company called HB11 Energy, co-founded by Professor Heinrich Hora, is pursuing a radically different path. Instead of giant magnets, they are using lasers. This dual-track approach highlights the two main philosophies in the fusion world.
Containing a Star: Magnets vs. Lasers
To understand the core technical challenge, it helps to use an analogy. Imagine you have to hold a miniature star, burning at 100 million degrees, in your laboratory. You can’t just put it in a box; it would vaporise any material it touches. This is the fundamental problem of plasma control systems.
1. Magnetic Confinement (The Magnetic Bottle): This is the approach used by CFS. It involves creating an incredibly powerful and complex magnetic field to cage the plasma, keeping it suspended in mid-air inside a doughnut-shaped reactor called a ‘tokamak’. The plasma particles, being charged, are forced to spiral along the magnetic field lines, never touching the reactor walls. The trick is making this magnetic bottle perfectly leak-proof. Any instability, any ‘wobble’ in the plasma, can cause it to touch the wall, cool down instantly, and halt the reaction.
2. Inertial Confinement (The Laser Execution): This is HB11 Energy’s game. Instead of a continuous reaction, you aim for a series of tiny, controlled explosions. You take a tiny pellet of fuel and hit it from all sides simultaneously with extraordinarily powerful lasers. The outer layer of the pellet vaporises, creating an inward shockwave that compresses and heats the core to fusion temperatures. The whole event happens in a fraction of a second, before the plasma has time to fly apart. It’s less of a bottle and more of a precision detonation.
For decades, both methods have struggled to produce more energy than they consume. But this is where AI is changing the game entirely.
AI: The Ghost in the Fusion Machine
The true breakthrough isn’t just in better magnets or more powerful lasers. It’s in the code. The behaviour of plasma is notoriously chaotic and difficult to predict. Building a controller for a tokamak was traditionally a painstaking process of trial and error. Engineers would run an experiment, watch the plasma collapse, study the sensor data, and then try to manually tweak the magnetic fields to prevent it next time. It was like trying to learn to juggle fireballs by getting burned over and over.
Now, we have scientific simulation AI. Researchers can build a ‘digital twin’ of a fusion reactor and use AI to run millions of simulated experiments in the time it would take to run one physical one. The AI can explore a far wider range of parameters, discovering new and non-intuitive ways to configure the magnetic fields to keep the plasma stable. Google’s DeepMind, for instance, has already developed an AI that learned how to control the plasma in a real-world tokamak, representing a huge leap forward for AI in fusion energy.
This AI-driven approach is what is giving investors like Hostplus the confidence to pour hundreds of millions into the sector. It’s not just about building the hardware anymore; it’s about having the intelligence to control it. The AI doesn’t just optimise; it discovers. It finds pathways to stable plasma that a human engineer might never have considered.
A Future Forged in Silicon and Starlight
So, where does this leave us? We are at a fascinating intersection. The AI revolution is creating an energy crisis, forcing us to confront the limitations of our current infrastructure. At the same time, it’s providing the very tools needed to unlock the holy grail of clean energy. The synergy is undeniable.
The timeline for commercial fusion is still a subject of fierce debate, but the most optimistic projections, like those from CFS, target the early 2030s for a net-energy-producing plant. That’s no longer ‘generations away’; it’s on the visible horizon. If they succeed, the implications are profound. We could have carbon-free, baseload power that is not dependent on the weather or time of day. For a world grappling with climate change and the energy demands of the 21st century, this is more than just a new power source; it’s a new paradigm.
The journey is far from over. The engineering challenges remain immense, and the economics of building and running these plants at scale are still being worked out. But for the first time, thanks in large part to the application of sophisticated AI, the path forward is clearer than ever. The quiet hum of servers in a data centre might just be harmonising with the roar of a distant, artificial sun.
What do you think? Is fusion energy the realistic answer to our AI-driven energy needs, or is it still a high-tech dream that will remain ‘just around the corner’?
