CFS to lead DOE Genesis Mission project on an AI digital twin of SPARC

Commonwealth Fusion Systems will lead a Department of Energy project to build an AI-enabled digital twin of SPARC, the fusion machine it is assembling in Devens, Massachusetts. DOE named it on October 8, 2026 among 12 Phase II Genesis Mission projects totaling $159 million, and neither the release nor DOE's selection list gives a per-project amount. The target, per partner Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory: full plasma-pulse predictions in less than 20 minutes, fast enough to return results between pulses in a tokamak such as SPARC.

The twin is a model of a machine still under construction. PPPL says it will be connected to SPARC and updated continually as data arrive, and that PPPL's own NSTX-U experiment in New Jersey will serve as the test bed to verify and validate the approaches before they are used on SPARC. PPPL is contributing simulation codes including M3D-C1, TRANSP and XGC. NSTX-U came up in September too, when the UK Atomic Energy Authority named digital twins of it and of MAST Upgrade among next steps it and PPPL had discussed, none of them committed (UK Fusion Week: a UK-US statement, a supercomputer link and up to £3m).

CFS says its team of 10 spans four national laboratories (Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, PPPL and SLAC), MIT and Carnegie Mellon, and Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, Synopsys and General Atomics. The work includes training reinforcement learning and agentic AI models for an AI-based SPARC operations co-pilot. Tom Looby, the CFS principal investigator, describes AI "turning hours of heavy simulations into instant insights between plasma pulses." The lab supplying the physics codes puts the turnaround at under 20 minutes.

CFS was the only company to lead one of the 12 projects; the other leads are universities and national laboratories, and CFS's is the only fusion project among them. The selection is a start, not a contract: DOE's list says selection for award negotiations "is not a commitment by DOE to issue an award or provide funding." SPARC itself is the machine CFS says will reach net fusion energy in 2027 (Fusion energy: milestones, money and rules).