Pacific Fusion breaks ground on a $1 billion fusion campus in Albuquerque

Pacific Fusion broke ground on August 25, 2026 on a $1 billion Research and Manufacturing Campus at Mesa del Sol in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the company announced. The campus will house the Demonstration System, a pulser-driven inertial fusion machine the company designed to achieve net facility gain, producing more energy from fusion than the total energy initially stored in the machine, by 2030. The same day, the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and Pacific Fusion announced a memorandum of understanding on fusion research collaboration.

The groundbreaking lands on the schedule Pacific Fusion published in July, when it wrapped the 3,000-shot Sirius reliability campaign at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that The Duck Curve covered in its Sirius coverage. That post noted the August groundbreaking was, at the time, a plan rather than an event. It is now an event, with Senator Martin Heinrich, Pacific Fusion board member and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and company CEO Eric Lander speaking on a panel at the site, per Source New Mexico's account.

What the campus is for

The Demonstration System is designed to hit two milestones no facility has: net facility gain, and high-yield fusion output, meaning bursts exceeding 100 megajoules. Pacific Fusion says it will be the only high-yield fusion facility under construction in the United States, and that the machine scales up the impedance-matched Marx generator architecture validated on Sirius; the company's next technical milestone is demonstrating a full-scale pulser module, the core building block of the system.

The company puts the campus at approximately 200 permanent jobs plus hundreds of construction and regional jobs, and says it is expanding manufacturing in Los Lunas, where it will build modular pulsed-power components. "Today's groundbreaking shows that America can still build the hard things, and build them faster than any other country, including China," said co-founder and chief technology officer Keith LeChien in the release.

An MOU with the weapons program

High-yield fusion is of interest to the NNSA because it creates conditions relevant to maintaining the nuclear stockpile without explosive testing; Pacific Fusion's release says the United States identified the need for this capability more than 30 years ago. The MOU, signed by NNSA administrator Brandon Williams and LeChien, establishes a framework to identify collaboration opportunities across high-yield fusion, high-energy-density science, pulsed-power technologies, advanced materials, and modeling and simulation.

The agency's own release is explicit about what the MOU is and is not: a first step, with "any specific projects or funding commitments" subject to separate agreements. "NNSA looks forward to collaborating with Pacific Fusion on the science that keeps our nuclear stockpile safe and reliable," Williams said in the company's release. Each document supplies its own competitive framing: Pacific Fusion's release names China as investing billions in next-generation fusion, while the NNSA release's narration refers to "our adversaries" expanding fusion and high-energy-density research infrastructure without naming a country.

The state money underneath

New Mexico has been positioning for this since well before the shovels. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham's office announced the $1 billion campus in September 2025, citing performance-based state and local incentives tied to job and investment commitments. That release also credits the New Mexico State Investment Council's venture strategy: the council had committed $1 billion to venture firms investing in the state, including Lowercarbon Capital, Lightspeed, and UP.Partners, all Pacific Fusion investors. "We hope New Mexico will be the first state to put fusion energy on the grid," Lujan Grisham said at the groundbreaking.

The state's largest utility showed up too: Public Service Company of New Mexico president and CEO Don Tarry said in the release that PNM is "excited for the opportunity to help explore its potential as part of our future generation mix" under the state's Energy Transition Act. That is a utility talking about a technology that, by the company's own description, has never demonstrated net facility gain anywhere.

Outlook

The nearest checkpoint is the full-scale pulser module: Pacific Fusion's July technical post described a prototype roughly 40 times the size of Sirius as under construction with completion projected within months, so a demonstration announcement in late 2026 or 2027 would be consistent with the company's own timeline. The MOU's substance is also testable: NNSA says specific projects and funding require separate agreements, so the first funded agreement, if one comes, will show whether the partnership is more than a framework. The 2030 net-facility-gain date remains a company target, with no independent verification available until the machine runs.