NVIDIA, Siemens, and CFS are working together to develop a new energy source for AI.
One of the biggest challenges in the further development of AI is the question of how to produce sufficient energy. NVIDIA, Siemens, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announced a promising alliance at CES 2026.
AI to be powered by the sun
CFS is considered one of the world’s leading companies in the field of nuclear fusion. The first plasma is scheduled to be ignited in 2026 at the SPARC fusion reactor near Boston. Reactors of this type could potentially solve many energy problems.
This is the SPARC fusion reactor: SPARC is a “tokamak” type reactor. It is shaped like a doughnut and is designed to hold plasma, i.e. extremely hot gas, in suspension inside it using strong magnetic fields.
At temperatures of over 100 million degrees Celsius, hydrogen isotopes fuse to form helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy. The goal is to generate more energy through fusion than is needed to keep the fusion going.
Digital twin: How announced, Siemens and NVIDIA are jointly building a virtual replica of SPARC. Siemens Xcelerator and NVIDIA’s Omniverse and OpenUSD are being used for this purpose.
This digital twin is expected to significantly accelerate the further development of the reactor. Experiments that would otherwise take years could be simulated in a matter of weeks. Errors can be found before a component is even assembled.
Interaction with AI: All of this should help to meet the immense energy demand created, among other things, by the AI boom. SPARC is comparatively compact, and data centers could theoretically operate their own ARC reactors (the commercial version of SPARC) at some point, producing their own energy directly on site.
On the other hand, the development of SPARC would probably not be possible at all without AI. AI models calculate in milliseconds how the magnetic fields need to be adjusted to keep the plasma in the reactor stable. AI therefore actively helps to tap into energy sources that are needed for AI.
Editorial opinion
erald Weßel: All of this is a logical and equally clever next step. Nuclear fusion and computing capacity have always been closely intertwined, and AI is now taking this symbiosis to the extreme. I think it’s entirely conceivable that the fusion of the two will reduce the wait for the first fusion reactor from decades to years.
However, the creators of SPARC are laying it on a bit thick with their arguments. Before we talk about miniaturization to decentralized individual reactors for individual data centers, we first need large central facilities. The history of technology is relentless in this regard: to create something tiny, we first have to master it on a large scale.
But even if SPARC ultimately loses out to tokamak projects such as ITER in France, one thing is certain: of the dozens of concepts currently competing in the field of nuclear fusion, the winner will use AI – and the energy consumed in the process will help to tap into a new energy source more quickly.
