For years, fusion power has been the tech world's ultimate vaporware, always 10 years away, never actually arriving. But according to TechCrunch, two founders are about to change that. Brandon Sorbom of Commonwealth Fusion Systems and David Kirtley of Helion are stepping onto TechCrunch Disrupt's Smart Systems Stage to discuss the roadmap for putting fusion energy on the grid, and they're not theorizing anymore.
This moment differs from earlier hype in one crucial way: these aren't academics with whiteboards. CFS is already moving past the demo phase. The company applied to PJM Interconnection in April, the largest U.S. wholesale electricity market, a critical real-world step toward connecting their ARC power plant to the grid. That's not "someday", that's now.
Helion's Kirtley has an even more aggressive timeline: his Orion plant is targeting a 50-megawatt supply to Microsoft by 2028. Big Tech is betting on fusion showing up on schedule, which changes the entire risk calculus. When Microsoft has a power purchase agreement tied to your deadline, you're not running a pet project.
The contrast between these two paths is instructive. Sorbom's MIT-rooted approach with SPARC builds on decades of academic fusion research, he co-authored the original ARC design while earning his PhD. That's the scientist-turned-entrepreneur story. Kirtley, backed by NSF and NASA, is building a more direct route to commercialization. Two different philosophies, same deadline pressure.
Fusion funding is reaching new scale. CFS pulled in another $1 billion in July alone, bringing total funding to $4 billion. That's institutional money backing these teams, not venture hopium. The grid-scale power problem isn't solved yet, but for the first time, it feels like someone's actually going to solve it rather than write grant proposals about it.
What Sorbom and Kirtley reveal at Disrupt could determine which fusion approach wins this race, and whether the grid gets clean, limitless power when the world needs it.
