The United States is placing its “chips” on power semiconductors, a card it has yet to play. On Thursday, the Department of Commerce announced $389 million (about RMB 2.8 billion) in R&D funding for four companies working on advanced power devices and critical materials, targeting power-hungry applications such as nuclear fusion and AI data centers.
The biggest share goes to Helion: the nuclear-fusion unicorn will receive $175 million. The logic is rock-solid: without power chips that can withstand high voltage, high frequencies, and high temperatures, the magnetic-confinement systems needed for commercial nuclear fusion simply won’t run—and liquid-cooled power systems for AI clusters won’t be able to handle the soaring power demands of connecting tens of thousands of GPUs.
The deal’s structure is intriguing: the government gets a minority stake, but no control or voting rights. This isn’t nationalization so much as a venture-capital-style “strategic LP” arrangement: the government shares in the upside from technological breakthroughs while leaving the business risks to the market. This completes the narrative arc of the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, extending from the “computing-power ceiling” of logic chips to the “capability floor” of power chips. The United States is using fiscal leverage to lay an invisible power grid for the next industrial revolution.
The biggest share goes to Helion: the nuclear-fusion unicorn will receive $175 million. The logic is rock-solid: without power chips that can withstand high voltage, high frequencies, and high temperatures, the magnetic-confinement systems needed for commercial nuclear fusion simply won’t run—and liquid-cooled power systems for AI clusters won’t be able to handle the soaring power demands of connecting tens of thousands of GPUs.
The deal’s structure is intriguing: the government gets a minority stake, but no control or voting rights. This isn’t nationalization so much as a venture-capital-style “strategic LP” arrangement: the government shares in the upside from technological breakthroughs while leaving the business risks to the market. This completes the narrative arc of the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, extending from the “computing-power ceiling” of logic chips to the “capability floor” of power chips. The United States is using fiscal leverage to lay an invisible power grid for the next industrial revolution.