A Shanghai-based compact tokamak startup racing to build the world's first high-temperature superconducting tokamak, leveraging China's deep magnet supply chain and aggressive funding environment.
Energy Singularity (ES, Chinese: 能量奇点) was founded in 2021 in Shanghai by a team of physicists and engineers drawn from China's established fusion research institutions. The company set out to build compact, high-field tokamaks using high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets, positioning itself as China's leading private fusion venture at a time when the country's state-run EAST and HL-2M programs were already among the world's most active.1
The startup's thesis is straightforward: HTS magnets, particularly those wound from rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) tape, enable dramatically smaller and more economical tokamak designs. By shrinking the machine, Energy Singularity aims to compress both the timeline and the capital required to reach net energy gain.
Energy Singularity's technical roadmap centers on compact, high-field tokamak reactors built around REBCO HTS magnets. The company benefits from proximity to China's dominant position in rare-earth mineral processing and REBCO tape manufacturing, giving it a potential supply-chain advantage over Western competitors pursuing similar magnet technology.2
The HH70 device, completed in 2024, served as a proof-of-concept for the company's integrated HTS magnet and tokamak engineering. While modest in scale, the device demonstrated the company's ability to design, fabricate, and operate an HTS-based plasma confinement system. Energy Singularity has announced plans for a larger follow-on device intended to achieve higher plasma performance and move toward demonstration-scale parameters.3
Energy Singularity has raised significant capital across multiple funding rounds, with reported total funding exceeding $200 million by early 2025. Investors include prominent Chinese venture capital firms and strategic investors with interests in energy technology. The company has benefited from a favorable policy environment in China, where fusion energy has been identified as a strategic technology in national planning documents.4
The company's strategy emphasizes speed of iteration and vertical integration, leveraging China's manufacturing ecosystem to move quickly from design to hardware. Energy Singularity has stated ambitions to deliver a fusion pilot plant by the mid-2030s, a timeline broadly consistent with the more aggressive end of the global fusion industry's projections.
Energy Singularity occupies a distinctive position in the global fusion landscape as the most prominent private fusion company in China. Its access to domestic HTS tape supply chains and a supportive policy environment represent structural advantages, though the company faces the same fundamental plasma physics and engineering challenges confronting all compact tokamak developers. Its progress on the HH70 and subsequent devices will be closely watched as a bellwether for China's private fusion sector.5