The Department of Energy’s Office of Science announced on November 2, 2026 that it is putting $8.5 million of fiscal 2026 money into 28 awards that pair private fusion companies with national laboratories and universities. The awards run through the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy, known as INFUSE, and the 28 projects involve 22 distinct commercial enterprises. Each project gets between $100,000 and $500,000, so the average award is about $300,000.
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Darío Gil, the department’s under secretary for science, said the race to commercial fusion will not be won in isolation, and that every challenge solved through INFUSE brings the country one step closer to an era of energy abundance.
28 awards, 17 laboratory leads and 11 university leads
The Office of Science announcement gives the structure of the round. Of the 28 projects, 17 are led by DOE national laboratories and 11 by universities. Terms run one or two years, and the research falls into four areas: modeling and simulation, materials science, plasma diagnostic development and enabling technologies. The department describes the common thread as scientific and technological challenges on the path to commercial fusion energy, the sort of problems a startup cannot solve without borrowing a lab’s instruments.
The counts also explain why 28 projects touch only 22 companies. Some businesses appear in more than one award, pairing with different labs for different problems. The release does not name the 22 companies, the labs or the universities attached to each project, and the Office of Science’s general awards page does not list the fiscal 2026 INFUSE round either, so the identity of the winners has to come from later disclosures by the companies themselves.
How INFUSE hands lab expertise to private fusion firms
INFUSE exists to speed up private-sector fusion work by making it easier for companies to tap expertise and facilities at federal laboratories and universities, according to the program’s home page. It is jointly led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and funded by the Fusion Energy Sciences program in the Office of Science. Those three labs also manage the competitive peer review that picked this year’s winners. The page lists Arturo Dominguez as the new director, succeeding Arnie Lumsdaine, who led the network from 2022.
The company side carries a financial obligation. The program’s application guidance requires a private partner to provide a minimum 20 percent cost share of the total project value, counting the government share and the private share together. For an award at the $500,000 ceiling, that rule implies the company puts in at least a fifth of the combined project cost. Applications that fail the requirements are rejected without further review, according to the guidance posted for the next round.
The mix of leads also says something. Laboratories head 17 of the 28 projects, about 61 percent, while universities lead the other 11. That tilt toward federal labs is consistent with the program’s design, since the facilities a startup most needs, such as diagnostics suites and materials test equipment, tend to sit at places like Oak Ridge, Princeton and Livermore, the three labs that run the network.
Money at this scale buys specific, bounded work. A $100,000 award is a few months of a researcher’s time and some instrument access, while $500,000 over two years can fund a modeling campaign or a materials test series. The average of about $300,000 per project is a small number beside the cost of building a fusion device, which is why the department leans on the network to extend its reach through partnership rather than through direct purchases.
A selection is not yet a payment, and the FY 2027 round is open
One caveat sits in the department’s release: selection for award negotiations is not a commitment by DOE to issue an award or provide funding. The department may cancel negotiations and rescind a selection for any reason during that process. Readers should treat the $8.5 million as an announced pool of selections rather than money already in company accounts.
The next cycle is already open. The INFUSE team opened its fiscal 2027 Request for Assistance, which accepts submissions from October 14 through December 13, 2026 at 5:00 p.m. Eastern. The new round expands eligibility for consortia and adds a review topic for preconceptual designs of fusion pilot plants, a larger-scale subject than the diagnostics and materials work funded this year.
The awards also fit into the department’s broader plan. The DOE Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap targets the mid-2030s for commercial fusion power on the grid and was developed with feedback from more than 800 researchers, engineers and industry stakeholders. It sets out a Build-Innovate-Grow approach, though the page states that the roadmap does not commit the department to specific funding levels and that future money is subject to Congressional appropriations. Against a mid-2030s goal, grants of $100,000 to $500,000 are small, and the open question is whether the pilot-plant design topic in the 2027 round draws bigger awards.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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