The Neuron: AI Explained
AI Is Helping Build the Power Source It Desperately Needs (Brandon Sorbom w/ Commonwealth Fusion Systems)
03 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is fusion and how does it relate to energy generation?
Fusion is the process that powers the sun, the stars. That's probably the first thing you know about it is that even though we're building machines to make it happen, we have an existence proof, which is the universe, which is pretty convenient. So fusion is kind of like you're making a sun, but you control the switch.
Since 1960, 1970, the progress in triple product actually slightly outpaced Moore's law. Fusion is kind of default off and you have to do all these special things to make it work. And that's why it's very, very inherently passively safe.
But that's also why it's been finicky enough that it's taken all this work over the last 50 years to get this like fragile little star that we're trying to create on earth. and keep it around long enough to make energy, because it keeps wanting to turn itself off. It's a very complex system.
And so having an AI reinforcement learning system that can go in and say, we don't know why exactly we're tweaking the knob like we are, but we notice that there's this behavior that happens when we measure certain other effects. There is no existing fusion industry, so we have to build it ourselves. We're using AI tools to build something that may eventually provide power to a data center.
AI is really taking on the heavy lifting here. So AI data centers are going to double their power consumption by 2030. And where is all that energy going to come from? Well, one of the answers a lot of people sure hope is going to be fusion. And that's the same process that powers the sun. Welcome humans to the Neuron AI podcast. I'm your host, Corey Knowles.
And I'm joined as always by the guy who treats a benchmark like a personality test, Grant Harvey. How are you today, my friend? ENFJ, that's how I'm doing. How are you, Corey? I'm doing good, man. Doing good. Really excited. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this. And I want to share an interesting twist on what Corey just said. So AI isn't just hungry for fusion power.
AI is actually helping building it. Today, we're joined by Brandon Sorbom, Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the company working with Google DeepMind and NVIDIA to build what might be the world's first commercial fusion power plant.
brandon welcome to the neuron it's great to have you awesome yeah i'm stoked to be here thanks for having me well i guess uh i guess to get started could you tell us a little bit about yourself your background and maybe for someone who's never heard of fusion kind of the the nickel tour of what it is sure yeah so quick background on me um i uh
Originally was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Did my schooling out there in electrical engineering and engineering physics. And I, in like the last couple of years of undergrad, I actually discovered fusion. It's pretty funny. I had never really thought about fusion that much until like the last couple of years of my undergraduate education.
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Chapter 2: How do high-temperature superconducting magnets change the fusion landscape?
Yeah. Yeah, I was, you know, I was doing, when I added my engineering physics major, I did that basically so I could take a bunch of fun physics classes that I hadn't been able to take yet. And yeah, one of the textbooks, you know, they always, all physics textbooks have like, you know, like general physics at the very like last chapter is like, oh, by the way, there's this thing called fusion.
It's the thing that powers the stars. It's pretty cool. And that's pretty much it. I was like, this seems like it's pretty important to learn about. It just went down a rabbit hole, which ended up taking me to the other side of the U.S., out to the Boston area to do my graduate research at MIT.
So MIT is one of the few schools in the country that has, or at the time, had a fusion experiment called a tokamak experiment. which maybe we'll talk about a little bit later, which we're building at Commonwealth Fusion Systems now. And we had one that we could actually play with at MIT called Alcator CMOD.
And so that was one of the things that drew me to go there for grad school is because grad students actually could like get their hands on the machine and run the machine, which I thought was pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. So could you explain, we might as well get into it. What is a tokamak and how does that relate to how fusion works? Yeah.
Yeah, so fusion is the process that powers the sun, the stars. That's probably the first thing you know about it is that even though we're building machines to make it happen, we have an existence proof, which is the universe, which is pretty convenient. So we know that fusion works because that's how the stars work. And it's actually funny, before we even...
knew before Pocomax existed, before we knew about fusion on Earth, fusion was actually postulated. It's been over 100 years since the process of fusion was postulated by Sir Arthur Eddington. And Basically, this was people were kind of trying to figure out how do the stars last so long?
Because, you know, before people knew about fusion, you know, you can telescopes were good enough that you could say, OK, you know, roughly the size of the stars. And you say, like, take a ball of gasoline and ignite it and see how long it goes. And it turns out the answer is that burns itself out very fast. You know, thousands and thousands of years, but not like billions of years. Yeah.
So somebody. you know, Sir Arthur Eddington postulated there was this other process that was happening that was powering the stars, which was the combination of these light nuclei that release energy in the process. And so what a tokamak is, is so stars run on gravity. So gravity basically sucks all of the particles together in this hot soup called a plasma. And stars can confine that.
The plasma wants to kind of disperse itself. It's very hot, and so it makes pressure, and it wants to sort of expand itself out. And how stars keep it from just expanding is gravity. Just the force of gravity sucks them back in and keeps things hot enough and confined enough so that you can have a plasma that actually self-heats itself.
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Chapter 3: In what ways is AI accelerating plasma control in fusion systems?
configuration of magnetic fields that basically makes a bottle that squishes in this plasma. Wow. Awesome. That really is. It's insane to think of harnessing that level of power here on Earth because, I mean, even the gravity itself is very different, I assume. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, so basically what you can think of fusion, it's sort of like, you know, like we already use the sun to power things, but, you know, you're sort of beholden to whenever the sun is out in the sky. And so fusion is kind of like you're making a sun, but you control the switch. Oh, wow. So you can turn on and off whenever you want.
But actually, the way that you get power is a little different than solar. The way that you get power from a fusion device is or most fusion devices is you actually the fusion, the fuel that we use, which is the easiest to burn fuel, which are these isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. So hydrogen is the lightest element.
And you burn these and you release... There's a charged particle that you release, which is a helium. That stays confined in the magnetic field and zips around and keeps the plasma hot. But the other particle you release is something called a neutron, which is just a single, it's a neutral subatomic particle. And that's not confined by the magnetic field. So that flies out of containment.
And if you surround the chamber... that has the diffusion plasma inside it with another chamber that has a liquid in it, your neutron will bounce around inside the liquid and deposit its energy and then keep the liquid. So at the end of the day, you're really boiling water. So just like most baseload power generation works today, which is actually kind of nice.
One way you could look at it is like, oh, that's boring. It's a fancy way to boil water. But another way you can look at it is it's actually great because you can reuse a whole bunch of infrastructure that we have already and for ways to boil water using coal or natural gas or oil. Yeah, that's awesome.
So I would love to know more about the magnets that make this possible because and specifically, you know, what you're doing at Commonwealth. But I do want to frame this for folks, particularly some people who are skeptical, right? Because fusion is one of those technologies that has been criticized for decades as perpetually 30 years away.
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Chapter 4: Why is fusion considered safer than fission?
So what is it that makes like specifically high temperature superconducting magnets that are available today, the breakthrough, the changes, the economics, and why couldn't this have been done, let's say, like 20 years ago? Yeah, no, it's a great question. You know, people have a right to be skeptical. And because it has been sort of for a long time, you know, people have been very optimistic.
And I think, you know, maybe taking a step back and thinking like philosophically, like it's hard not to be really optimistic about this. And I think part of the challenge is that this is such a transformational change that in the past people have been.
when people were orders of magnitude away from solving this, they thought, oh, we're going to be really fast and be able to surmount this mountain as far as performance. And it was a little slower, but actually, you guys are probably familiar with Moore's Law, right? About the doubling of transistor chips or doubling of the speed or doubling of the density. There's different forms of it. But
the progress in um something called the triple product so this is um i won't go too deep into the weeds we only have an hour don't have 10 hours one of the best metrics that you can use for fusion on like how close you are to you know to getting to uh getting a plasma that is actually like usable to make you know net energy out of it is this thing called the triple product which is
temperature density and confinement time and what you can think about like temperature it's pretty obvious you need the plasma to get hot you get really really hot so that these particles can smash smash into each other and fuse density you basically need enough fuel that one's also kind of obvious like you need to have be putting enough fuel into this thing so there's enough particles that can fuse
And then confinement time is the last one, which is a little bit more esoteric, but it's basically that's sort of like the confinement time is the piece where you need to use the fields, whether they're magnetic fields or gravitational fields, to keep the thing from dispersing so that it can self-heat itself and not just kind of like you make a blip and then it's gone, right?
And so those three things together is what you need. And so the reason I bring this up is because since 19... 1960, 1970, the progress in triple product actually slightly outpaced Moore's law, like on a time, like, right? That's crazy, right? It was actually going slightly faster than Moore's law. So we actually, it's a misnomer to say that we were making no progress.
We were very, very far away from when we started and we made a lot of progress. But I think a big difference between Fusion and chips is that at every step along the way of Moore's law, you could sell those chips. And so there was a useful product that people could, you know, like if you go back 20 years, obviously computers were way slower.
30 years, computers were way slower back then, but people were still buying them because that was the state of the art and things just kept getting better. And Fusion, there's this threshold effect, though, where you have to get above a certain triple product before it commercially makes sense to sell this thing where you have net energy. And so even though there was a lot of progress,
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Commonwealth Fusion Systems face in building fusion power plants?
I mean, if you look at pictures of it, I mean, you could fit like an elephant inside of the vacuum chamber that the plasma is in. And the reason for this, why it's so big is there, you know, it wasn't like they, they built it big because they wanted to is because that was the one knob that they had to increase performance. And so.
The thing that we sort of latched onto is that in the interim, the thing that was limiting the magnetic field was this type of superconductor that you're using. So taking a step back again and going back to magnets. So there's two types of magnets. There's one that's like the type that you put on your fridge, which is a permanent magnet. And those max out at about two Tesla.
You can get really, really strong permanent magnets that max out around two Tesla. So if you want a stronger magnet than that, you have to use something called an electromagnet, which is if you ever like remember from like high school, you wrap a wire around a nail and you put the ends of the wires on a battery and you can pick up paperclips. Right. Like that's an electromagnet.
And if you make a really strong electromagnet, you can lift cars. Right. Like a junkyard. And if you if you've ever had like an MRI, that's a very strong electromagnet. That makes a big background magnetic field. And so one way that you can build an electromagnet is using copper wire, which a lot of tokamaks, most tokamaks for their magnets, built them using copper.
But the problem with copper is that in addition to making a magnetic field, when you put current through it, it gets hot. It's kind of like a filament in an incandescent light bulb or a toaster oven where you put current through it and it starts to glow. And you're like, it's a lot of power to run this. And that's kind of counterproductive.
You know, wanting to have a power plant that actually like puts electricity out, not just consumes a lot of electricity. Yeah. Right. So the magnets that for a power plant, you would need a magnet that's a superconductor. And so now instead of using copper, you have this these sort of like magical materials that, you know, all the way down to like quantum mechanical effects.
make them not dissipate heat when you put current through them. So you can still, you can basically have your cake and eat it too with superconductors. You can put lots of current through the superconductor and get a magnetic field with that, but you're not dissipating that current resistively. So you're not heating up the wire in the superconductor that's making your electromagnet.
Are there other applications for those? Where else would you find a superconductor? Yeah, so like the MRIs that I mentioned, MRIs are superconducting magnets. And so that's actually why there's often, you'll see like cryogenic equipment near MRIs. So another property of superconductors is you have to keep them very, very cold.
That's one of the, in order to sort of turn on the quantum mechanical weirdness that makes superconductors work, you have to get them cold. As are actually a lot of things, quantum, that use quantum mechanical effects. You've got to get really, really cold in order to make them work.
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Chapter 6: How does the collaboration with Google DeepMind impact fusion technology?
And then that tape has sort of the middle of this tape is the superconducting material. And so it took about 30 years, though, to figure out how to do all of that manufacturing, to go from the science to here's a product. And that takes you to like 2010-ish, where people were just starting to fabricate like meter long lengths of this wire.
And we said, okay, you still can't build a magnet with that, but we can see a little bit out in the future. And we can say, people can make a meter now, they can make 10 meters and then a hundred and then a thousand. And then you can start using that stuff to make magnets. So what if we had a fusion concept that threw out the constraint of having magnets
a very high or a low magnetic field and say, remove that constraint. And now you can have a high magnetic field. Now you can turn back the knob on performance of size. You can turn that back a bit because you're compensating with the lower size by the higher magnetic field with these magnets. That's sort of in a nutshell. Was this happening at the time that you were at MIT?
Because my understanding is that Commonwealth spun out of MIT. Is that right? Yep. Yeah, exactly. So we, in 2012, there was a design course that my advisor and one of the academic co-founders of CFS, Dennis White, he teaches a design course every couple of years at MIT. And he posited, he said, okay,
assume like right now this industry doesn't exist but assume that you can get all the tape that you need we call it tape because it looks like tape assume you can get all the high temperature superconducting tape that you would need design a fusion power plant around that and so we went through the exercise and we said whoa we can actually design it like a factor of 100 smaller in volume
and like factor of 10 smaller in like linear dimension than the current devices and we said wow like this is you know this is really really good maybe it's more like factor of 50 and a factor of a few but you know still you could massively reduce the size of these devices if you had the magnets that would allow you to do that. And so we then published the paper.
The paper got really good reception. We said, we should actually maybe do this and not just have a paper study, but maybe try to do this. And that was kind of like the seeds of starting a company eventually to to both prove out the magnet technology because nobody had built a real like big magnet out of this.
People had built like little sort of like benchtop magnets out of it, but to build like a real commercial, even though the device is small, the magnets are still like the size of a car. And so it's still, you know, you're still building like a large engineered structure that has a lot of self forces on it that want to bend itself out of shape. So it's, it's both a, it's an electromagnetic problem.
It's a structural challenge. And so the engineering was not simple to do this. And so we said, okay, let's put a company together so that we can get the money. And also, by the way, the industry for HTS was still not producing nearly the volumes that we needed.
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Chapter 7: What are the expected timelines for commercial fusion energy?
demonstration, but it was a demonstration that we had retired the production risk of, okay, now, now that you've shown that this technology works, can you build like an assembly line that looks like, you know, it looks like a Tesla, you know, assembly line with robots and things like that, that you can actually crank out, you know, the sub components of these magnets fast enough so that you could actually build 18 of them in a couple of years, as opposed to a
Or it would not be great if we had figured out this technology and then it was like, okay, it's going to take a really long time to build it. That would not work for this whole plan. So that was sort of like the last step of showing that the technology works was showing that you can also manufacture it at scale. Yeah. And that's why that was a really exciting moment for us.
second one is actually we haven't like formally announced that yet but the you know the second one is is uh is already you know been been carried over with not nearly as much fanfare um because the first you know once you do the first one it's like okay now they're going to start you know just like rolling into the uh into the assembly area
So a lot of people hear nuclear and immediately think of all of the various disasters that have happened over the years with Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, et cetera, and the waste storage issues. Fusion is fundamentally different, though, as I understand. Would you mind kind of explaining that to us a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really great question.
And it's actually funny because it ties us back to MRIs. Excellent. So fusion. Yeah. So so fusion is a fundamentally it is a nuclear process in that it it does it deals with the nuclei of atoms. But it is very, very different from fission, which, like you said, like when people say nuclear now, they mean they actually mean fission. Yeah, but nuclear is kind of used.
It's used a little too broadly. And so we, we don't use the word nuclear when we say fusion, even though it is technically a nuclear process. We don't use the word nuclear when we're describing it because it is such a different process than fission.
so fission is breaking apart very large atoms so if you have like a uranium atom and you smack it with a neutron you can break that uranium atom apart and it will it'll break apart into a couple chunks and it'll also release a couple neutrons of its of its own and that if there's other uraniums that are close enough it will then cause those to fission and if you uh if you have enough of it close together you can have a chain reaction basically
and so the whole name of the game in fission or at least for fission if you're trying to make a power plant as opposed to like a bomb the whole name of the game is you want to control that chain reaction so it doesn't it doesn't run amok and so you have these control rods and you're basically balancing out a process where you get it just at the point because you don't want it to peter out as well so you're sort of like
You're always making it so that it is just at the edge of being critical and it keeps going. Fusion is a much different process because in fusion, instead of having a chain reaction where your reaction is causing itself to go, the process that powers it is really the temperature of the plasma.
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Chapter 8: What future advancements could arise from successful fusion energy implementation?
So I have a data center question. We keep hearing about that there's this big projected need that's going to continue to increase by 2030 and so on. Is there any chance Fusion arrives in time to be of assistance there, like we've heard about from people in the AI space? Or is this really more of a 2035 and forward play?
I mean, we are pushing as fast as possible to get the first power plants on the grid, like early 2030s. Wow. That's an aggressive goal. But I think, you know, every day, it's one of these things where like every day counts. You have dual pressures of, you know, you have climate change on one side and you have demand on the other. And both of those are pressures to go fast, right?
Both of those things, you know, the solution is not to go slower. It's to go faster. But you've got to get it right at the same time, right? got to get it right. Yeah. Yeah. I saw a talk that you did where you started really like, I've got a need, a need for speed. I like this guy already. Yeah. One of my favorite quotes. Oh my gosh. Well, can AI help you with that process?
Is all of this, like these collaborations that you have, you know, does this make you more bullish that you're able to hit those timelines? Like how, how, how does AI impact that in your opinion? Yeah, definitely. I mean, the, I think the AI will allow us to basically, I mean, at the end of the day, you even on, on spark.
So spark is the first device that we're building right now that we just shipped, you know, a magnet into the tokamak call for, and then arc would be the power plant. After that there's. There's going to be a lot of learning that we're able to do, even on Spark, that will be able to affect the final design of Arc.
And so the faster we can utilize Spark as a learning, you know, Spark, we're very confident that Spark will get Q greater than one.
there's still a bunch of learning that we'll be able to do to optimize how arc runs past that point right and so the the ai techniques will uh hopefully allow us to learn much faster on spark so you still have to run the experiments on the actual device and get like you know
truth of like what actually what is what is nature you know what is nature going to tell you but we want to use these techniques to basically speed our you know there's this whole canvas in front of us this whole space to explore and we want to be able to explore that space as efficiently as possible as we map it out and that's what we really think that's what we're really optimistic that these ai techniques will allow us to do you're basically putting your your
Well, I mean, I was going to say something else, but I mean, you are literally putting your money where your mouth is because you have this deal with Google where you just signed a direct power purchase agreement with them, which means that you actually have to deliver, right? Yep, definitely. So you got to make it happen. It's sort of circular, right?
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