President Donald Trump’s social media company, Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), said on Thursday that it’s merging with TAE Technologies, a Southern California-based company that has been chasing the dream of fusion power for nearly 30 years.
The all-stock transaction, valued at more than $6 billion, would expand Trump Media’s presence into the nascent fusion power space while data centers clamor for more electricity amid the ongoing AI boom.
Fusion industry insiders expressed curiosity over the deal and voiced concerns about potential conflicts of interest with the U.S. Department of Energy. Last week, industry representatives met with Energy department officials, urging them to help direct billions of dollars toward fusion projects, and earlier this year, the DOE announced a new roadmap to guide commercial efforts in the sector, though it didn’t commit any new funds alongside the announcement.
TMTG is the parent company of Truth Social, the microblogging platform that the president spun up after he was banned from platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook in the wake of the January 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. At launch, the president called it “a rival to the liberal media consortium,” and said he wanted to “fight back against the Big Tech companies.”
TMTG went public last year via a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), a technique used to go public by private companies that want to raise money quickly but aren’t yet mature enough to take the traditional IPO route. In the quarter ended September 30, 2025, TMTG reported that it recorded a loss of $54.8 million on revenue of $972,900.
Truth Social and the company’s streaming platform have failed to generate much revenue, but TMTG has nevertheless managed to amass $3.1 billion in assets, largely through its cryptocurrency investments and partnerships.
TMTG CEO Devin Nunes, formerly a Republican congressman, stated that the company’s acquisition of TAE would “cement America’s global energy dominance for generations.” The companies said they plan to site and begin construction on “the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant (50 MWe)” next year, and have plans for more fusion plants that are expected to generate between 350 megawatts to 500 megawatts of electricity.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
But the path forward for fusion power remains uncertain.
Currently, only one experimental device has proven that controlled fusion reactions can generate more power than they consume. Several other companies, including Bill Gates-backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Sam Altman-backed Helion, are in the race to put fusion power on the grid sometime in the early 2030s.
If one or more fusion startups succeed, they could deliver gigawatts of clean, continuous power to the grid using nothing more than hydrogen isotopes filtered from seawater. Inside a fusion reactor, those isotopes are heated and compressed until they turn into a plasma. When particles in the plasma collide, they merge to form a new, heavier atom while releasing tremendous amounts of heat, which can be harvested to generate electricity.
TAE has been working on a range of fusion devices since the late 1990s. The company has raised nearly $2 billion in total, including a recent $150 million round from existing investors including Google, Chevron Technology Ventures, and New Enterprise. The company has been valued at about $1.8 billion, according to PitchBook.
Over the years, TAE has struggled to make its various designs work. Its latest effort uses magnetic fields generated by rotating plasma to stabilize the plasma itself. Particle beams bombard the outside of the plasma cloud, helping it to spin.
In the meantime, TAE has also created a new division focused on the life sciences. It is selling a version of its particle accelerator as a radiation treatment for cancer.
After the merger, Nunes and TAE CEO Dr. Michl Binderbauer will serve as co-CEOs of the combined company.
Update 12:05 p.m. ET: Added comments from fusion industry insiders.
