Thea Energy wins $20 million to scale fusion magnet production

Thea Energy has won a $20 million award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy to scale production of the high-temperature superconducting magnets it says will power its stellarator fusion system. The company says the money will help establish the first domestic production line of modular HTS magnets in Kearny, New Jersey.

The grant lands inside ARPA-E’s SCALEUP Ready program, which is designed to push energy technologies toward commercial-scale manufacturing. That makes the award less a bet on fusion physics than on whether the critical hardware can be made repeatably, cheaply and in the United States. ARPA-E has said HTS magnets are important for compact fusion energy systems, and one agency program page says HTS-based fusion systems could help drive conductor costs down to about $10 per kA-m.

Thea Energy has been building toward that manufacturing step for more than a year. On February 8, 2024, the company said it had raised a separate $20 million Series A round to accelerate the next phase of planar coil magnet array manufacturing and integrated stellarator system modeling. It announced a new headquarters in Kearny on January 21, 2025, saying the space would support core technology development and scaling of key superconducting magnet activities. On March 20, 2025, Thea said it had demonstrated the world’s first superconducting planar coil magnet array. On September 11, 2025, the company said it had been selected for three U.S. Department of Energy public-private partnership awards through the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy program.

The sequence shows how quickly Thea has moved from financing to fabrication to federal partnership, but it also highlights how early the field remains. Thea describes its approach as arrays of mass-manufacturable magnets paired with dynamic software controls, an attempt to make stellarator fusion more economical and scalable. Stellarators themselves have long been viewed as promising, but they have historically received less attention than tokamaks, the better-known fusion design.

That broader policy backdrop matters because Washington has spent the past several years trying to pull fusion out of the lab and into an industrial supply chain. ARPA-E launched its BETHE fusion program in April 2020, and in April 2026 it said it was making a record $135 million investment in fusion energy. The new Thea award tests whether that federal push can do more than fund milestones, and whether a magnet line in Kearny can become the kind of domestic manufacturing base fusion companies have promised for years.