When Sam Altman arrived at Helion Energy’s small Redmond, Wash., office in early 2014, nuclear-fusion textbooks tucked under his arm, the company was focusing its efforts on research and development. By the time he left, several days later, he had persuaded the fusion-energy startup to chart a more aggressive path toward deployment, CEO David Kirtley recalls.
A year later, Altman, who was co-founding OpenAI around the same time, invested $9.5 million in Helion, taking the role of chairman. He plowed a further $375 million into Helion in 2021, making it one of the largest personal bets in his multibillion-dollar portfolio.
Once a government-led pursuit, nuclear fusion is now a private-capital race, much of it financed by the same people building energy-hungry AI and pursuing the goal of creating systems with human-like intelligence, known as artificial general intelligence (AGI).
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