Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building new supply chains for commercialization

From the article

When Commonwealth Fusion Systems needed thousands of kilometers of a miracle material that barely existed, it had two choices: wait for someone else to build the supply chain, or do it themselves. 

CFS chose the latter, transforming a Nobel Prize-winning lab curiosity into the foundation of what could be the world’s first commercial fusion power plant.

That material — high-temperature superconducting tape that resembles an old cassette tape — was CFS’ key to solving fusion energy’s biggest challenge: building reactors powerful enough to contain plasma at 150 million degrees, while also being small enough for commercial use. But first, the company had to bootstrap an entire industry around a product that had never been manufactured at scale.

“When we saw this material, [we were] like this is great, we could build a magnet out of it,” said Rick Needham, chief commercial officer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, speaking at [a live recording of *The Green Blueprint*](https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/green-blueprint-the-superconducting-tape-set-to-make-fusion-power-plants-possible/) at Latitude Media’s [Transition-AI conference](https://www.latitudemedia.com/events/transition-ai-2025/). “And then it’s like, well, how much is available? Maybe a hundred meters of it, and for our device, we’ll use thousands of kilometers.”

The tape looks deceptively simple. “It’s basically mostly steel, and there’s one layer in there [that’s]…one micron thick where you can send about 2000 amps across it with zero loss,” Needham explained. When you wind that tape around in a circle, it becomes “the biggest, strongest, most powerful magnet in the world”.

The physics are straightforward: stronger magnets mean smaller reactors. And the smaller the reactor, the more likely it is to be commercially viable.