Proxima Fusion Bets €140M on HTS Tape to Break Asia's Fusion Supply Dominance
TL;DR
- Proxima Fusion will invest €140 million to build Europe's first large-scale factory for fusion-grade high-temperature superconducting tape, targeting production for its Stellaris stellarator fleet.
- The move tackles a critical choke point in fusion, as over 80% of high-performance HTS tape today comes from suppliers in China, Japan and South Korea.
- By localizing magnet supply in Germany, Proxima aims to de-risk its 2030s timeline for grid-ready stellarators and give Europe strategic autonomy in the commercial fusion race.
Why HTS Tape Is Fusion's Make-or-Break Ingredient
Forget plasma for a moment. The real arms race in fusion right now is in magnets.
Modern compact fusion machines, whether tokamaks or stellarators, live or die by high-temperature superconducting tape. Coated with rare-earth barium copper oxide, or REBCO, this thin metallic ribbon can carry enormous current with zero resistance when cooled to around 20 Kelvin.
That allows magnets to generate fields of 12 to over 20 Tesla — two to three times stronger than the low-temperature superconductors used in ITER. Stronger fields mean you can confine hotter, denser plasma in a much smaller machine. For Proxima Fusion, which is pursuing a quasi-isodynamic stellarator design called Stellaris, HTS is non-negotiable.
Without thousands of kilometers of defect-free, high-current tape, there is no Stellaris. Without Stellaris, there is no steady-state, disruption-free power plant that Proxima has promised for the early 2030s.
Inside Proxima's €140M Factory Plan
Proxima Fusion, the Munich-based spinout from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, says its new plant will be the first in Europe dedicated entirely to fusion-grade HTS tape at industrial scale.
The €140 million investment will fund a fully integrated facility in Germany for deposition, copper stabilization, testing and spooling of REBCO tape. While the company has not disclosed the exact site, it says the factory is designed to produce hundreds to over a thousand kilometers of tape per year in its first phase — enough to supply multiple generations of stellarator magnets.
Crucially, the tape will be tuned for fusion, not for other uses like MRI machines or power cables. That means optimized for high field strength, high neutron irradiation tolerance, mechanical stress resistance, and ultra-low joint resistance for winding massive non-planar stellarator coils.
Proxima says the plant will come online in stages starting in 2027, with full-scale output timed to feed its next demonstrator magnet program and its planned prototype power plant, Stellaris-1. The project is expected to create over 150 high-skilled jobs in advanced materials, vacuum deposition and magnet engineering.
Breaking Asia's Grip on Supply
Today, anyone building an HTS fusion magnet has to call Asia.
Japan's Fujikura and Furukawa Electric, China's Shanghai Superconductor Technology and Suzhou New Material, and South Korea's SuNAM account for the vast majority of global REBCO tape volume. U.S. players like SuperPower and AMO exist, but capacity is limited and lead times stretched to 12-18 months as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Tokamak Energy and others stockpile tape for their own magnets.
Prices remain punishingly high at $80 to $150 per kiloamp-meter, and fusion developers complain about batch-to-batch variability, limited widths, and export controls. For a single commercial stellarator needing 5,000 to 10,000 km of tape, that is both a cost risk and a geopolitical risk.
Proxima is framing its factory as a sovereignty play. By bringing production in-house in Europe, it insulates itself from supply shocks, tariffs and shipping bottlenecks, while giving European utilities and regulators a fully traceable, ITAR-free supply chain under the EU Net-Zero Industry Act and Euratom fusion strategy.
Europe's Bid for Fusion Independence
The announcement lands as Brussels scrambles to avoid repeating the solar and battery story, where Europe ceded manufacturing to Asia and then paid the price.
The European Commission has named fusion a strategic net-zero technology, and Germany, France and the UK have all boosted public funding for public-private stellarator and tokamak programs. Proxima, which raised more than €200 million in private capital plus German federal backing, has become the poster child for that push.
A domestic HTS source does more than help Proxima. It creates an anchor supplier for the entire European ecosystem — from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and CEA magnet labs to suppliers like THEVA, the German HTS pioneer Proxima has previously partnered with, and Oxford Instruments. Analysts say that could cut magnet costs by 30% or more at scale through automation, yield improvements and shorter qualification loops.
In short, Europe wants to own the fusion stack, not just design reactors and import the magnets.
Accelerating the Race to Commercial Power
The timing is no accident. The global race to put fusion electrons on the grid has shifted from physics papers to industrial execution.
In the U.S., Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building its SPARC tokamak in Massachusetts and scaling its own HTS supply chain with Furukawa. In the UK, Tokamak Energy and the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production program are pushing hard for the early 2030s. China has surged ahead with BEST and CFETR programs backed by state-funded HTS capacity.
Proxima is betting stellarators will win on reliability. Unlike tokamaks, stellarators run inherently steady-state with no plasma disruptions, making them far more attractive to utilities — if you can master their fiendishly complex 3D magnets. High-fidelity HTS tape produced next door to its magnet winding hall lets Proxima iterate coil designs in weeks, not months.
If the €140 million factory delivers on yield and cost, Proxima could move from buying tape on the global spot market to dictating the pace of stellarator deployment. That is the difference between building one science experiment and building a fleet of power plants.
What Comes Next
Challenges remain. Scaling REBCO deposition from lab reels to kilometer-long, defect-free runs is notoriously hard. Yields can crater, and competitors have burned cash trying to master metal-organic deposition and pulsed laser deposition at speed.
Proxima will need to prove it can match Japanese and Chinese incumbents on critical current density and uniformity while bringing costs down the learning curve. Funding for the factory blends equity, debt and expected German and EU support, and final permitting is still pending.
But the signal is clear: fusion is no longer just about who has the best plasma physics. It is about who controls the factory floor. With this bet, Proxima Fusion just made Europe a serious contender to own it.
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