TAE Technologies

TAE Technologies, Inc., formerly Tri Alpha Energy, is an American company based in Foothill Ranch, California developing aneutronic fusion power. The company's design relies on an advanced beam-driven field-reversed configuration, which combines features from accelerator physics and other fusion concepts in a unique fashion, and is optimized for hydrogen-boron fuel, also known as proton-boron or p-¹¹B. It regularly publishes theoretical and experimental results in academic journals with hundreds of publications and posters at scientific conferences and in a research library hosting these articles on its website. TAE has developed six generations of original fusion platforms, with a seventh in development as of 2025. It aims to manufacture a prototype commercial fusion reactor by 2030.

Organization

The company was founded in 1998, and is backed by private capital. It operated as a stealth company for many years, refraining from launching its website until 2015. It did not generally discuss progress nor any schedule for commercial production. However, it has registered and renewed various patents.
As of 2021, TAE Technologies had more than 250 employees and had raised over US$880 million.

Funding

Main financing has come from Goldman Sachs and venture capitalists such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc., Rockefeller's Venrock, and Richard Kramlich's New Enterprise Associates. The Government of Russia, through the joint-stock company Rusnano, invested in Tri Alpha Energy in October 2012, and Anatoly Chubais, Rusnano CEO, became a board member. Other investors include the Wellcome Trust and the Kuwait Investment Authority. As of July 2017 the company reported that it had raised more than $500 million in backing. As of 2020, it had raised over $600 million, which rose to around $880 million in 2021 and $1.2 billion as of 2022.

Leadership and board of directors

TAE's technology was co-founded by physicist Norman Rostoker, as a spin-off of his work at the University of California, Irvine. Steven Specker, former CEO of the Electrical Power Research Institute, was CEO from October 2016 to July 2018. Michl Binderbauer, who earned his PhD. in plasma physics under the guidance of Rostoker at UCI, moved from CTO to CEO following Specker's retirement. Specker remains an advisor. Further board members include Jeff Immelt, former CEO of General Electric; John J. Mack, former CEO of Morgan Stanley; and Ernest Moniz, former United States Secretary of Energy at the US Department of Energy, who joined the company's board of directors in May 2017.

Collaborators

Since 2014 TAE Technologies has worked with Google to develop a process to analyze the data collected on plasma behavior in fusion reactors. In 2017, using a machine learning tool developed through the partnership and based on the "Optometrist Algorithm", it found significant improvements in plasma containment and stability over the previous C-2U machine. The study's results were published in Scientific Reports.
In November 2017, the company was admitted to a United States Department of Energy program, "Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment", that gave it access to the Cray XC40 supercomputer.
In 2021, TAE Technologies announced a joint research project with Japan’s Institute for Fusion Science, a three year-long study on the effects of hydrogen-boron fuel reactions in the NIFS Large Helical Device.
In June 2025, Google invested in the company's funding round for fusion energy development. The company raised more than $150 million through Google, Chevron and New Enterprise Associates.

Subsidiaries

TAE Life Sciences

In March 2018 TAE Technologies announced it had raised $40 million to create TAE Life Sciences, a subsidiary focused on refining boron neutron capture therapy for cancer treatment, with funding led by ARTIS Ventures. TAE Life Sciences also announced that it would partner with Neuboron Medtech, which would be the first to install the company's beam system. TAE Life Sciences shares common board members with TAE Technologies and is led by Bruce Bauer.

TAE Power Solutions

In September 2021, TAE Technologies announced formation of a new division, Power Solutions, to commercialize the power management systems developed on the C-2W/Norman reactor for the electric vehicle, charging infrastructure, and energy storage markets, with UK-based industrialist David Roberts as its CEO.

Merger with Trump Media & Technology Group

In December 2025, TAE Technologies announced a merger with Trump Media & Technology Group valued at $6 billion, and expected to take place in mid-2026. The merger is expected to help TAE with the capital to build a commercial reactor, with TMTG supplying $200 million at signing, and a further $100 million upon the filing of Form S-4.

Design

Underlying theory

In mainline fusion approaches, the energy needed to allow reactions, the Coulomb barrier, is provided by heating the fusion fuel to millions of degrees. In such fuel, the electrons disassociate from their ions, to form a gas-like mixture known as a plasma. In any gas-like mixture, the particles will be found in a wide variety of energies, according to the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. In these systems, fusion occurs when two of the higher-energy particles in the mix randomly collide. Keeping the fuel together long enough for this to occur is a major challenge.
TAE's machines spin plasma up into a looped structure called a field-reversed configuration which is a loop of hot, dense plasma. Material inside an FRC is self-contained by the fields the plasma creates. As the plasma current moves around the loop, it creates a magnetic field perpendicular to the direction of motion, much like current in a wire would do. This self-created field helps to hold in the plasma current and keeps the loop stable.
The challenge with field-reversed configurations is that they slow down over time, wobble, and eventually collapse. The company's innovation was to continuously apply particle beams along the surface of the FRC to keep it rotating. This beam and hoop system was key to increasing the machines' longevity, stability and performance.

TAE's design

The TAE design forms a field-reversed configuration, a self-stabilized rotating toroid of particles similar to a smoke ring. In the TAE system, the ring is made as thin as possible, about the same aspect ratio as an opened tin can. Particle accelerators inject fuel ions tangentially to the surface of the cylinder, where they either react or are captured into the ring as added fuel.
Unlike other magnetic confinement fusion devices such as the tokamak, FRCs provide a magnetic field topology whereby the axial field inside the reactor is reversed by eddy currents in the plasma, as compared to the ambient magnetic field externally applied by solenoids. The FRC is less prone to magnetohydrodynamic and plasma instabilities. The science behind the colliding beam fusion reactor is used in the company's C-2, C-2U and C-2W projects.
A key concept is that the FRC is kept in a useful state over an extended period. To do this, the accelerators inject the fuel such that when the particles scatter within the ring they cause the fuel already present to accelerate in rotation. This process would normally slowly increase the positive charge of the fuel mass, so electrons are also injected to keep the charge roughly neutralized.
The FRC is held in a cylindrical, truck-sized vacuum chamber containing solenoids. It appears the FRC will then be compressed, either using adiabatic compression similar to those proposed for magnetic mirror systems in the 1950s, or by forcing two such FRCs together using a similar arrangement.
The design must achieve the "hot enough/long enough" threshold to achieve fusion. The required temperature is 3 billion degrees Celsius, while the required duration is multiple milliseconds.
TAE's reactor can produce up to 100 times more fusion power output than a tokamak based on the same magnetic field strength, plasma volume, and fuel type. The increased geometric efficiency inherent in the FRC design is enough to compensate for the lower yield and reaction probability of p-B11 fuel and makes the aneutronic reaction viable.

The ¹¹B(''p'',α)αα aneutronic reaction

An essential component of the design is the use of "advanced fuels", i.e. fuels with primary reactions that do not produce neutrons, such as hydrogen and boron-11. FRC fusion products are all charged particles for which highly efficient direct energy conversion is feasible. Neutron flux and associated on-site radioactivity is virtually non-existent. So no radioactive waste is created, unlike the short-term byproducts produced in nuclear fusion research involving deuterium and tritium, and unlike the long half life radioactive waste created in nuclear fission. The hydrogen and boron-11 fuel used in this type of reaction is also much more abundant than the fuel used in nuclear fission.
TAE Technologies relies on the clean ¹¹Bαα reaction, also written ¹¹B, which produces three helium nuclei called α−particles as follows:
A proton striking boron-11 creates a resonance in carbon-12, which decays by emitting one high-energy primary α−particle. This leads to the first excited state of beryllium-8, which decays into two low-energy secondary α-particles. This is the model commonly accepted in the scientific community since the published results account for a 1987 experiment.
TAE claimed that the reaction products should release more energy than what is commonly envisaged. In 2010, Henry R. Weller and his team from the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory used the high intensity γ-ray source at Duke University, funded by TAE and the U.S. Department of Energy, to show that the mechanism first proposed by Ernest Rutherford and Mark Oliphant in 1933, then Philip Dee and C. W. Gilbert from the Cavendish Laboratory in 1936, and the results of an experiment conducted by French researchers from IN2P3 in 1969, was correct. The model and the experiment predicted two high energy α-particles of almost equal energy. One was the primary α-particle and the other a secondary α-particle, both emitted at an angle of 155 degrees. A third secondary α-particle is also emitted, of lower energy.