Proxima Fusion Raises €411M From Google, RWE at €2.4B Valuation

Fusion rounds this large used to be an American story. Bloomberg reports that German fusion startup Proxima Fusion has raised €411 million, roughly $469 million, at a €2.4 billion valuation, in a round led by XTX Ventures, the investment arm of Alex Gerko's algorithmic trading firm XTX Markets, and London's East X Ventures. Google and national energy firm RWE joined as strategic backers.

The interesting piece is not the size of the check, it's who wrote it. Google's participation is being described in the reporting as its first European fusion investment, which fits a pattern hyperscalers have been walking down for two years now. As AI workloads push data-center power needs into new territory, the same names writing training-compute checks are quietly writing energy checks, and the geography of those energy checks is starting to spread outside the US. RWE joining as an equity investor, just months after signing an agreement to partner with Proxima on building the first stellarator fusion power plant at the former Gundremmingen fission site in Bavaria, is the more concrete signal. A European utility is now on both sides of the trade, site owner and shareholder.

Proxima's plan, as described in the coverage, is a two-stage stellarator program. First, Alpha, a net-energy stellarator demonstrator in Garching slated for the early 2030s, which reporting describes as a roughly €2 billion buildout on its own. Then Stellaris, positioned as Europe's first commercial stellarator fusion plant, on the Gundremmingen site. The €411 million is earmarked in part for high-temperature superconducting cable and magnet production, which is the hard engineering bottleneck for any stellarator design.

The honest caveat is that no stellarator has ever produced net energy at scale, 'early 2030s' is aspirational, and the €411 million is a fraction of what the Alpha demonstrator alone is expected to cost. Take the specifics as reported, not as settled. What the coverage does not lay out is the split between the strategic checks and the financial leads, which technical milestones the money is meant to unlock, or whether Google secured offtake rights on eventual power. If the pipe holds together, the upside for buyers of clean firm power, hyperscalers first and then everyone else, is a second procurement lane that does not depend on the US fusion field alone.