China is famous for throwing money at industries it wants to develop, and one of the latest to get that distinction is nuclear fusion – a process that promises to deliver huge amounts of electricity at cheap prices by mimicking the process used in the sun. That campaign for fusion energy has taken on greater urgency with the rise of AI, which is a huge consumer of electricity.
But the latest fusion energy project coming out of China Inc. isn’t state funded at all, and instead is being financed by some of the nation’s top private equity and venture capital investors, including Hillhouse Capital, Legend Capital and Luminous Ventures, formerly known as Lightspeed Capital. That company, NovaFusion Energy Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., also known as NovaFusionX, made headlines last week when it announced a new funding round worth 700 million yuan ($103 million).