Avalanche Energy picks Tri-Cities for fusion factory

Avalanche Energy builds small fusion machines, compact enough that one version could sit on a desk. On Thursday, the Washington-based startup and the Tri-City Development Council, known as TRIDEC, announced a plan. They'll build Avalanche's first factory for making these machines at scale. The facility will go in the Tri-Cities region of Washington state. The company says the plant could eventually turn out hundreds of fusion machines a year.

Avalanche already runs a smaller fusion test site nearby, called FusionWERX, built with a $10 million state grant. This new announcement is only a letter of intent, not a finished factory. Avalanche and TRIDEC still need to pick an exact site and line up permits. They still need to build a local supply chain and workforce. None of Avalanche's fusion machines have produced net energy yet.

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Will a manufacturing plant exist before the fusion machines it's built to produce actually work? That's the bet here. Building a factory ahead of a mature product is unusual, but fusion companies are increasingly doing exactly that. They're racing to have manufacturing capacity ready the moment the physics catches up. If Avalanche's technology doesn't pan out, Tri-Cities ends up with a factory built for a market that never arrives.