By 2028, Washington-based Helion Energy plans to bring its 50-megawatt Orion power plant online and begin supplying electricity to Microsoft under a landmark power purchase agreement inked in 2023. If it succeeds, Orion will be the first commercial fusion power plant, harnessing the same physics that powers the sun to produce clean, virtually limitless energy. In October, the company secured local permitting approvals, but the bigger news came in February, when Helion's seventh-generation prototype, Polaris, reached 150 million degrees Celsius—a new commercial temperature record—and became the first privately developed fusion machine to achieve measurable fusion with deuterium-tritium fuel. "As you go up in that temperature, your fusion process gets more efficient and you can recover more of the fusion energy," says CEO and co-founder David Kirtley. “It also starts to unlock even more advanced fuels that make more electricity." Helion is pressing ahead: the company recently opened a new manufacturing facility to increase production of electronics for its fusion machines by a factor of 60 with an eye toward building commercial plants.