When Proxima Fusion was founded in early 2023 as the first-ever spin-out from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), it was with a bold mission: to deliver stellarator fusion power plants to the world faster than anyone thought possible. Two years later, we’re a team of over 80 scientists and engineers operating across Munich, Zurich, and Oxford. Momentum is building every day.

But why now? Why is fusion – especially stellarator-based fusion – moving so fast? What changed? What’s possible today that wasn’t possible just five years ago?

Let’s take a look at what led us here.

2022: The Breakthrough Year for Stellarators

The year 2022 marked a tipping point for stellarators, a moment of validation and renewed possibility that changed the trajectory of fusion research.

That year, Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), the world’s most advanced stellarator, achieved its key design targets. Operated by the IPP and built with over €1.3 billion in public investment, W7-X confirmed that extreme manufacturing precision is achievable on the scale needed for an optimized stellarator, and that the theoretical physics behind the machine works. A landmark paper showed that the predictions from complex simulations matched experimental results.

In the wake of those results, Europe suddenly had a huge advantage on stellarators.

In the same year, researchers demonstrated (Landreman & Paul PRL 2022) that stellarator plasmas could be numerically optimized to exhibit precise symmetries, which opened the door to a new class of optimized stellarator designs. The extension of these ideas to quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarators (Goodman et al. JPP 2023) laid the mathematical foundation for practical stellarator fusion power plants that meet both physics and engineering constraints… like Stellaris, Proxima’s groundbreaking fusion power plant concept developed in partnership with the IPP and published at the beginning of this year.

From Impossibility to Opportunity

If you’ve ever looked at a stellarator, you won’t be surprised to hear it: stellarators aren’t easy to build. Their 3D geometries are complex, and small changes to their shape can have major impacts on performance. Full-scale prototypes are too expensive and slow to build just for iterative learning. In 2022, our founding team saw that this wasn’t only a limitation – it was a once-in-a-generation opportunity for disruption.

What if you could connect simulation tools in a single, powerful framework?

Computational power has grown dramatically in the past five years. By combining decades of public fusion data with modern simulation tools, we realized we could create a new kind of design loop: faster, automated, and more accurate than anything before.

In 2023, Proxima Fusion was born, and our founding team set out to build that computational framework.

Stellarators Are Computationally-Enabled Devices

Stellarators don’t just benefit from computation: they depend on it. Designing a stellarator is like solving a massive 3D puzzle with physics, materials science, and engineering constraints all interwoven. Our simulation environment allows engineers to explore different designs, test them through multi-physics models, and automatically generate and refine. The pace at which we’re doing this now would’ve been impossible five years ago.

And the next leap forward? It’s already underway: AI is accelerating the way we write code, do engineering design, and explore parameter spaces that classical methods simply can’t reach. We are continuously evolving StarFinder, our stellarator optimization platform, so that it allows us to prototype, then automate, collect data, and finally extract AI-driven insights.

By embedding AI into our workflows, we’re not just speeding up our efforts – we’re heading into a new world, a world in which AI completely disrupts the way we do engineering. Our tooling and methods allow us to leverage increased intelligence, which will ultimately be powered by AI, alongside heightened performance of our computationally enabled devices to produce more – and cheaper – energy.

That’s why we’re building a new dedicated AI team, starting with an AI Augmentation Lead and an Automation & Knowledge Engineer. If you’re ready to turn bold AI ideas into reality, join our mission!

The Time is Now

The convergence of physics validation, computational maturity, and AI is reshaping what’s possible in fusion energy… and nowhere is that more visible than in the stellarator.

We believe stellarators are the most promising path to clean, continuous commercial fusion power, and 2025 is the year they stop being the dark horse and become the frontrunner.