Proxima Fusion will spend €140M ($162.6M) on a factory making fusion-grade high-temperature superconducting tape, the Munich company said, in a push to secure a component almost entirely sourced from Asia.
The plan follows the startup’s €411M raise earlier this year, which lifted it among Europe’s best-funded fusion developers. Lower Saxony is contributing €21M, with the rest drawn from public and private sources.
HTS tape generates the powerful magnetic fields that contain plasma inside a reactor. Proxima’s demonstration plant will need 20,000 kilometres of the material, and a commercial power plant double that.
The vast majority of HTS tape is produced in China and Japan, leaving European reactor designers exposed to supply and trade risk. Proxima argues that owning production gives it control over cost, quality and delivery schedules.
The material only became commercially viable in the past ten to fifteen years, and it reshaped reactor economics. Machines that once depended on enormous low-temperature magnets could suddenly be built smaller, because the tape carries current without resistance at higher thermal thresholds.
Demand is no longer confined to fusion. Companies such as Veir use the material to raise the power density of data centre connections, putting the technology in competition with the AI infrastructure boom for scarce capacity.
Proxima has not said when the plant will start production. If it succeeds, Europe would gain its first domestic source of a material that currently shapes the fortunes of every fusion developer on the continent.
