Helion’s 2028 Fusion Deadline: Breakthrough or Overpromised Power Play?

Helion’s 2028 Fusion Deadline: Breakthrough or Overpromised Power Play?

If you care about the future of energy prices, climate policy or Europe’s industrial competitiveness, you should be paying attention to a small fusion company in Everett, Washington. Helion just reported a major technical milestone on its path to deliver electricity to Microsoft by 2028. That date is not a vague “sometime in the 2030s” promise – it’s written into a contract.

In this piece, we’ll unpack what Helion actually achieved, why its approach is so different from mainstream fusion projects, what’s at stake for global and European energy systems, and whether the 2028 deadline is realistic or a dangerous distraction.

The news in brief

According to reporting by TechCrunch, U.S. fusion startup Helion says its Polaris prototype has now heated plasma to about 150 million°C using deuterium–tritium fuel. That’s roughly three quarters of the temperature the company believes it needs for a commercial plant.

Polaris uses a field‑reversed configuration (FRC): plasma is formed at both ends of an hourglass‑shaped chamber, accelerated towards the centre and then compressed with powerful magnets in rapid pulses lasting less than a millisecond.

Unlike most fusion projects that plan to extract heat and drive steam turbines, Helion’s design aims to convert fusion energy directly into electricity via changing magnetic fields during each pulse.

The company ultimately wants to switch to deuterium–helium‑3 fuel, which better fits its direct‑conversion concept but is extremely scarce on Earth, so Helion is developing its own production route.

In parallel, Helion is building Orion, a 50 MW reactor intended to supply power under an existing 2028 electricity contract with Microsoft. The company has not disclosed whether Polaris has reached scientific breakeven, saying it focuses on net electricity instead of pure physics milestones.

Why this matters

Helion is no longer just another physics experiment – it is now one of the clearest tests of whether private fusion can move at software speed while still respecting hard engineering reality.

On the positive side, several things stand out:

• Hitting 150 million°C with deuterium–tritium in an FRC is a non‑trivial engineering achievement. This isn’t another simulation result; it’s hardware running at punishing conditions.
• The company’s insistence on direct electricity conversion is strategically important. If it works, you skip steam turbines, cooling towers and some of the massive CAPEX that makes today’s nuclear and large fusion projects so expensive and slow.
• The 2028 Microsoft deal turns fusion from “maybe one day” into a bankable product roadmap. That forces clarity on timelines, grid connection, financing and regulation in a way academic projects often avoid.

But the risks are just as large:

• 2028 is effectively tomorrow in infrastructure terms. Going from a prototype that runs for milliseconds to a 50 MW commercial‑grade power plant in less than three years of real construction and commissioning time would be unprecedented in the energy sector.
• The switch from deuterium–tritium to deuterium–helium‑3 adds another layer of difficulty. Helion must not only prove its reactor works, it must also stand up an entirely new fuel cycle at scale.
• By refusing to anchor progress to familiar metrics like scientific breakeven, Helion asks investors, regulators and potential customers to trust its internal accounting of “net electricity”. That’s understandable competitively, but it complicates independent validation.

Who benefits? If Helion hits anything close to its ambitions, large tech buyers like Microsoft get a new tool to decarbonise data centres and AI infrastructure. Grid operators gain a source of firm, dispatchable clean power that complements wind and solar. The losers are obvious: long‑lived fossil assets and, potentially, conventional nuclear projects whose economics look worse if modular fusion becomes credible.

The bigger picture

Helion’s announcement lands in the middle of a broader shift: fusion has moved from being almost entirely state‑funded science to a crowded private race.

Over the last few years we’ve seen:

• The U.S. National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieve and repeat fusion ignition in inertial confinement experiments – scientifically historic, but not a power plant path.
• Tokamak‑based startups like Commonwealth Fusion Systems raise multi‑billion‑dollar war chests, betting on high‑temperature superconducting magnets to shrink ITER‑style reactors.
• European concepts such as First Light Fusion’s projectile‑driven approach and stellarator‑based ventures like Renaissance Fusion explore alternatives to classic tokamaks.

In that landscape, Helion is the radical outlier on three fronts:

1. Pulsed FRC geometry instead of continuous‑operation tokamaks or laser capsules.
2. Direct electrical output, not giant turbines.
3. Aggressive commercial date: 2028, not “early 2030s” or “mid‑century”.

Historically, every fusion timeline has slipped. ITER is the prime example: initial target dates have drifted by well over a decade, and costs have ballooned. The usual pattern is: the physics works earlier than expected; the engineering, integration and licensing take far longer.

Helion claims to shortcut some of that by making its machines smaller and more modular than ITER or DEMO‑style reactors. That could matter as much as the core physics: if a plant looks more like an industrial machine and less like a megaproject, you can iterate faster and finance it with private capital rather than multi‑government treaties.

At the same time, we shouldn’t ignore grid‑level realities. A pulsed reactor that fires many times per second creates high‑frequency power output that must be smoothed and integrated into existing systems. Materials must survive extreme cyclic stresses. None of that is solved by hotter plasma alone.

What Helion proves – even if it misses 2028 – is that fusion has entered the “execution and credibility” phase. The key question is no longer “will fusion ever work?” but “who can deliver bankable plants, at what cost and at what scale?”

The European and regional angle

For Europe, Helion’s progress is both a warning and an opportunity.

On the one hand, Europeans have spent decades funding large public projects like JET in the UK and ITER in France, and backing DEMO‑class concepts via EUROfusion. These programmes have built world‑class expertise – but they move on political timescales, not startup timescales.

Helion’s Microsoft deal highlights a gap: European cloud and hyperscale players (SAP, Deutsche Telekom, OVHcloud, Telefónica Tech and others) are not yet signing comparable fusion power purchase agreements. If U.S. tech giants secure first access to firm clean fusion power, they could gain a structural cost advantage in AI and cloud services.

Regulation is another key angle. The EU’s Green Deal, the emissions trading system (ETS) and the upcoming rules around green taxonomy and sustainable finance will determine how quickly fusion – including foreign providers – can be financed and connected to European grids. Fusion falls into a grey zone: it has nuclear‑adjacent safety issues but avoids long‑lived waste, so it doesn’t map neatly onto current nuclear frameworks.

Then there is energy security. Member states like Germany have shuttered nuclear fission plants and increased dependence on imported gas, while countries such as France, Finland and Slovenia continue to rely on nuclear as a baseload pillar. If Helion or its peers can genuinely offer compact, dispatchable fusion units in the 2030s, they could dramatically reshape discussions around:

• coal phase‑out timelines in Eastern and Southern Europe,
• long‑term LNG infrastructure plans,
• and whether smaller member states should build their own fusion capacity or import it as electricity or as packaged plants.

For now, European startups like Marvel Fusion (Germany), First Light Fusion (UK) and Renaissance Fusion (France) ensure the region is not absent from the race. But the centre of gravity of private fusion is clearly in the U.S., and Helion’s latest milestone reinforces that.

Looking ahead

What happens next will be less about temperature records and more about systems engineering.

Key things to watch:

1. Sustained operation, not single shots
   Can Helion demonstrate reliable, high‑repetition pulses with consistent performance, and for how long? The leap from a lab milestone to something approaching power‑plant duty cycles is enormous.

2. Evidence of net electrical output
   At some point – perhaps via third‑party audits or regulatory filings – Helion will need to show convincing data that a full system delivers more electricity out than in, not just more fusion energy than input energy.

3. Helium‑3 production at scale
   The company says its internal helium‑3 production has been easier than expected. The real test will be throughput, cost and purity when scaled up to feed Orion‑class machines – and whether it chooses to sell helium‑3 as a strategic fuel to other fusion players.

4. Regulatory and grid integration
   For a 2028 plant, permits, site work and grid connection would need to be well underway now. Any visible slippage there is a strong indicator that the commercial date will move.

My own expectation: the 2028 contractual date will be more symbolic than literal. We’re likely to see a demonstration‑scale machine producing measurable power by around then, but not a fully commercial, continuously operating 50 MW plant feeding electrons into the grid like a mature gas turbine.

That’s not a failure. Even a partial success would accelerate the entire fusion sector and could pull forward realistic fusion deployment into the 2030s, rather than “sometime this century”. The bigger risk is political: that policymakers treat Helion’s promise as an excuse to delay near‑term climate action, betting on a technology that is still unproven at scale.

The bottom line

Helion’s 150‑million‑degree milestone is technically impressive and strategically important, but the real test is whether the company can turn hot plasma into reliable, regulator‑approved, grid‑connected megawatts on anything like its 2028 schedule.

If it succeeds even halfway, fusion will shift from science fiction to a serious option in national energy planning – and Europe will have to decide whether it is a customer, a competitor or both. The key question for readers and policymakers alike is simple: are we preparing our energy systems for that possibility, or just watching from the sidelines?