Germany’s Proxima Fusion said Wednesday it plans to build a €140 million ($162.6 million) factory to produce fusion-grade high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape — the material that most of the world’s fusion startups currently buy from suppliers in China and Japan.
The Munich-based company said its demonstration plant will require 20,000 kilometers of HTS tape, and its commercial power plant will need roughly twice that amount. Owning the supply of a component that sits at the core of its reactor design reduces the startup’s exposure to foreign suppliers and to the price and delivery schedules they set.
Also read: Instagram Now Lets You Add Tagged Posts Directly to Your Profile Grid
What HTS tape actually does
HTS tape is a ribbon-like superconductor that carries large currents with almost no electrical resistance at temperatures far higher than conventional superconductors allow. Wound into coils, it becomes the backbone of the magnets that generate the powerful fields used to contain plasma inside a tokamak or stellarator. That performance is why HTS tape emerged a little over a decade ago as one of the breakthroughs behind the current generation of private fusion ventures — it enables smaller, cheaper reactors than machines built around older superconducting technology.
The material is not purely a fusion story. Veir, among others, is using HTS tape to raise the efficiency and power density of data centers, a use case that is growing alongside the artificial intelligence boom. That means the tape supply chain is being pulled on from at least two fast-moving industries at once.
Also read: Automattic board ousts CEO Matt Mullenweg in surprise vote, appoints CFO as interim leader
Why a German tape factory matters for the fusion race
Proxima’s move is less about vertical integration for its own sake and more about industrial utilize. Fusion startups have spent the past several years raising record sums and publishing reactor designs, but relatively few have tried to secure the physical inputs those designs depend on. HTS tape is a thin, specialized market; when demand spikes, buyers without their own capacity can face long lead times and limited negotiating room.
The funding mix reflects how governments are treating fusion as strategic infrastructure rather than a pure venture bet. The €21 million contribution from Lower Saxony follows Proxima’s €411 million round earlier in 2026, which pushed the company into the top tier of the best-funded fusion developers globally. Public money at the state level typically comes with expectations about jobs, local supply chains, and industrial sovereignty.
The timing is also notable. Fusion has shifted from a laboratory curiosity to a sector where countries compete over who controls the machines, materials, and magnets required to build power plants. Europe currently imports nearly all of its HTS tape, so a domestic plant — built by a private company with public backing — is a small but concrete step toward a European fusion supply chain.
What to watch next
Several questions remain open. Proxima has not specified a construction timeline or an operating start date for the plant, nor which suppliers or partners it will work with during the build-out. Those details matter for whether the facility actually eases the tape bottleneck before the company’s demonstration plant needs its first 20,000 kilometers.
Rivals are watching closely. Other fusion startups rely on the same Asian tape producers, and a competitor controlling its own production could influence prices, availability, and the pace at which those companies can scale. If the model works, expect more fusion developers — and possibly data center infrastructure firms — to consider similar bets on the upstream materials their machines depend on.
The company has said it will use a mix of public and private funding for the factory. How much total private capital Proxima ends up committing to the project will be a useful signal of how confident investors are that tape production, and not just reactor design, is the next competitive front in fusion.
Warning: Attempt to read property "term_id" on false in /www/wwwroot/stockpil.com/wp-content/themes/flex-mag/functions.php on line 998
