President Donald Trump’s social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), he said on Thursday which merges TAE Technologiesa Southern California-based company that has been chasing the dream of fusion power for nearly 30 years.
The total transaction, valued at more than $6 billion, will expand Trump Media’s presence in the nascent fusion energy space as data centers clamor for more electricity amid the ongoing artificial intelligence boom.
Fusion industry insiders expressed curiosity about the deal and raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest with the US Department of Energy. Last week, industry representatives met with officials of the Ministry of Energyurging them to help direct billions of dollars to fusion projects and earlier this year, the DOE announced a new road map to lead commercial efforts in the sector, although no new capital was committed alongside the announcement.
TMTG is the parent company of Truth Social, the microblogging platform the president created after being banned from platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook following the January 6 attacks on the US Capitol. At the launch, the president called it “an adversary of the liberal media consortium” and said he wanted to “fight back against the big tech companies.”
TMTG went public last year through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), a technique used to go public by private companies that want to raise money quickly but are not yet mature enough to take the traditional IPO route. In the quarter ended September 30, 2025, TMTG was mentioned that it recorded a loss of $54.8 million on revenue of $972,900.
Truth Social and the company’s streaming platform failed to generate much revenue, but TMTG nevertheless managed to amass $3.1 billion in assets, mostly through its cryptocurrency investments and partnerships.
TMTG CEO Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman, said the company’s acquisition of TAE would “consolidate America’s global energy dominance for generations.” The companies said they plan to install and start construction of the “world’s first utility-scale (50 MWe) fusion power plant” next year and have plans for more fusion units expected to generate between 350 megawatts and 500 megawatts of electricity.
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But the way forward for fusion power remains uncertain.
Currently, only one experimental device has demonstrated that controlled fusion reactions can produce more power than they consume. Several other companies, such as Bill Gates-backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Sam Altman-backed Helion, are in the race to put fusion power on the grid sometime in the early 2030s.
If one or more fusion startups succeed, they could deliver gigawatts of clean, continuous power to the grid using nothing more than hydrogen isotopes filtered from seawater. Inside a fusion reactor, these isotopes are heated and compressed until they turn into plasma. When the particles in the plasma collide, they fuse to form a new, heavier atom while releasing vast amounts of heat, which can be harvested to generate electricity.
TAE has been working on a range of fusion devices since the late 1990s. The company has raised nearly $2 billion in total, including a recent $150 million round from existing investors including Google, Chevron Technology Ventures and New Enterprise. The company has been valued at about $1.8 billion, according to PitchBook.
Over the years, TAE has struggled to make its various plans work. His latest effort uses magnetic fields created by the plasma’s rotation to stabilize the plasma itself. Beams of particles bombard the outside of the plasma cloud, helping it rotate.
In the meantime, TAE has also created a new department focusing on life sciences. It sells a version of its particle accelerator as a radiation therapy for cancer.
Following the merger, Nunes and TAE CEO Dr. Michl Binderbauer will serve as co-CEOs of the combined company.
Update 12:05 p.m. ET: Added comments from fusion industry insiders.
