Pacific Fusion chooses Albuquerque for $1 billion nuclear fusion site

Months of wondering have been put to rest — Albuquerque will officially be home to Pacific Fusion’s first research and manufacturing campus.

A major win for New Mexico, the California-based nuclear fusion energy company has selected Albuquerque’s Mesa del Sol to build its $1 billion facility, officials announced Friday. Since July, the state has held its breath as it navigated competition from California cities Livermore and Alameda.

“It feels great to win here in New Mexico,” state Economic Development Secretary Rob Black told the Journal. “When you talk about fusion companies around the world, Pacific Fusion is one that a lot of people are betting will be successful in this technology race.”

From venture capital investors to Sandia National Laboratories’ experts, Pacific Fusion’s choice of New Mexico puts the state in the broader conversation of fusion technologies, Black said.

Carrie von Muench, Pacific Fusion co-founder and chief operating officer, said the company “can build on New Mexico’s leadership in applied physics innovation in order to advance clean energy technologies — in particular, fusion technologies — which are, in some ways, the holy grail of clean energy.”

The announcement follows Albuquerque city councilors unanimously approving $776.6 million in industrial revenue bonds last week, effectively granting Pacific Fusion tax exemptions for 20 years, as well as $10 million in economic development incentives for the buildout of the facility. In New Mexico, IRBs, which in this case were issued by the council, work similarly to a loan, with a lender purchasing the bond and the developer paying off the debt with revenue from the company.

Albuquerque — known for its research in energy and breakthrough technologies like quantum, thanks to Sandia National Laboratories — competed with California cities in the Tri-Valley near San Francisco, which also offered tax incentive packages, albeit much less generous than what was offered in New Mexico.

The facility, once built, will be an economic boon for the city, officials said. The 225,000-square-foot facility is expected to offer over 200 long-term jobs and hundreds more during construction. The project is estimated to generate more than $400 million in economic activity within the first four years of operation, according to research from the Albuquerque Regional Economic Alliance, or AREA.

Mayor Tim Keller told the Journal that the investment Pacific Fusion will bring to Albuquerque is a “shot-in-the-arm booster” for the economy.

“In the long run, it puts us at the forefront of sustainable fusion technologies in the world,” Keller said. “This is literally putting us on the map for one of the most cutting-edge and innovative technologies that the modern world has ever produced.”

Keller said cities and states typically look to invest in growing industries, which is something New Mexico has done before, like when it brought Intel Corp. to Rio Rancho as the semiconductor industry boomed.

But, he said, the work Pacific Fusion is doing is something “much bigger.”

“This, quantum and, to a certain extent, Kairos (Power), these are about Albuquerque literally being the founder, the creator of some of these source technologies that will power dozens of other industries down the road,” Keller said. “We very well could be the city for these innovative quantum and fusion technology efforts.”

Founded in 2023, von Muench said Pacific Fusion is working to “power the world” with abundant and affordable fusion energy, offering on-demand power without carbon emissions, long-lived radioactive waste or dependence on intermittent resources.

The company’s speed with which it began searching for a viable site was due in large part to the more than $900 million in Series A funding Pacific Fusion received last year from venture capital firms General Catalyst and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, among others.

The stars, including our own sun, are powered by fusion, which is essentially “squishing” light atoms together to produce heavier atoms that convert matter directly into energy, von Muench said. While an everyday occurrence in space, replicating it on Earth has been a challenge.

That is, until now.

“You might be familiar with the running joke, which is that ‘(fusion) is 30 years away and always will be,’” von Muench said. “We founded this company because that is no longer the case.”

While nuclear fusion has not yet been commercialized like other renewable energies — think solar and wind — von Muench said multiple breakthroughs have changed what’s possible in the fusion field, the first being when researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory demonstrated controlled fusion ignition. This defined the physical conditions required to get more energy out of fusion than what the lab put in.

Then, she said researchers at Sandia’s Z Pulsed Power Facility achieved the second-highest fusion performance on its Z Machine, the world’s most powerful and efficient laboratory radiation source utilizing magnetic fields with high electrical currents to produce high temperatures, pressures and powerful X-rays.

Further building on that, von Muench said Keith LeChien, Pacific Fusion co-founder and chief technology officer, invented a technology that more than doubles the efficiency and power density of what Sandia researchers did with the Z Machine.

New Mexicans have watched various breakthroughs happen here, but not necessarily stay to grow upon. The same is true for fusion technologies, which, Black said, were first invented through the Z Machine. Now that the rest of the world knows what is possible, he said, building on and retaining the state’s workforce in this sector helps make the technology “sticky” when commercial opportunities arise.

“We’re mutually really excited to be able to build this next-generation facility right in the backyard of the facility that made it possible,” von Muench said. “We look forward to continuing to work with the state to make this project successful and, hopefully, make New Mexico a birthplace of a fusion economy — not just a single project.”

The company is looking to break ground on the Mesa del Sol facility sometime next year, officials said, though it isn’t clear when it will be operational.

In the meantime, Pacific Fusion will set up a “build center” to manufacture machinery components that’ll be used once the main center is completed. Pacific Fusion officials did not disclose where the build center would be located, but noted it would still be utilized once construction is done.

Selecting the Mesa del Sol site was no easy feat, but it checked a lot of boxes. Pacific Fusion, von Muench said, had a number of basic requirements: sufficient power supply and a certain amount of acreage.

AREA is often the first point of contact for business development and project management looking to set up in Sandoval, Bernalillo, Valencia or Torrance counties.

Interim CEO Chad Matheson said AREA worked with Pacific Fusion to evaluate its needs. From there, he said AREA sent out a “call for sites” to both economic development directors and commercial real estate companies to submit potential locations.

While the Mesa del Sol area is both residential and commercial, AREA Vice President of Business Development Aida Roberts said not being directly next to homes was also a key factor for Pacific Fusion. The facility will be adjacent to Kairos Power, a nuclear technology company.

“It is seeing tremendous housing growth, which is amazing from an ability to attract workforce and, in addition to having a great anchor tenant with Kairos Power, there’s going to be workforce synergies attracting people to Mesa del Sol as a location for that type of facility and operation,” Matheson said.

When looking to build a highly specialized fusion research and manufacturing facility, von Muench said New Mexico and the Bay Area were the only “natural places” for Pacific Fusion to consider.

“We found in this state a national lab partner who’s really excited to advance our mutual missions and the science that supports those, a state partner who’s committed to making this a fast and capital efficient place to build, a place in which we could hopefully bring more of our suppliers and continue to expand with time, and a workforce that we think can meet our needs,” von Muench said. “It made a lot of sense for this strategic expansion.”