Nvidia And This Bill Gates-Backed Startup Are Building Fusion Power With AI |
In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at building a virtual fusion plant, a major quantum breakthrough, AI for drug discovery and more. To get The Prototype in your inbox, sign up here.
Bill Gates-backed Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is aiming to develop commercial fusion power, is partnering with Nvidia and Siemens to accelerate development of its power plant.
The companies are doing this by creating a “digital twin” of Commonwealth’s project using Siemens’ datasets and Nvidia’s AI models. This virtual version of the fusion power generator will be used in simulations to revise designs, which can then be tested with the real thing to see how closely it matches its counterpart.
This process will enable the company “to compress years of manual experimentation into weeks of virtual optimization,” CEO Bob Mumgaard said in a statement.
Tech companies are increasingly looking at nuclear power—both conventional fission and fusion—to help support the massive energy needs of the data centers fueling the AI revolution. OpenAI is working with fusion power startup Helion (CEO Sam Altman is an investor), for example. And just today Meta announced a series of deals with different nuclear power companies.
The cloud revolution of the past couple of decades has been enabled by a simple fact: It’s easy to copy and store information on a computer. For quantum computing, however, this isn’t the case. This is because the information stored on quantum bits (qubits) is fragile on a physical level,........