The Company’s first Eos-spec magnet reliably reached the magnetic fields and electrical currents required to create power plant-relevant, steady-state fusion in its upcoming “Eos” stellarator
KEARNY, N.J., May 13, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Thea Energy, Inc., a technology company advancing the stellarator for the commercialization of an abundant source of baseload fusion power, today announced the successful operation of the Company’s first full-size, full-current, and full-field stellarator planar shaping coil. This milestone confirms the Company’s magnet technologies for its first large-scale integrated stellarator system, “Eos”, including the design, manufacturing, and operational capabilities. Eos will demonstrate the Company’s ability to build fusion systems faster and for less capital, enabled by Thea Energy’s core technology that uses simpler, software-controlled magnet arrays, a step change from the limiting, complex 3-dimensional magnets of prior generations of the stellarator. This approach represents a new paradigm for fusion and will translate to cost-competitive power plants with greater scalability and higher uptime.
Thea Energy has optimized its stellarator architecture to use standardized circular, planar magnets for its shaping coil array. This coil geometry is the most efficient use of high-temperature superconducting tape, and the simplest to manufacture at scale. Thea Energy’s stellarator architecture combined with the standardization of all shaping coils to only one unique part enables faster and more efficient production. This recent milestone demonstrated and confirmed the highest performance levels required for Eos shaping coils and gives the team confidence to proceed into Eos manufacturing scale-up and construction.
At 20 K, Thea Energy’s Eos-spec coil generated the full magnetic fields and currents required for the upcoming Eos integrated stellarator. This magnet created and controlled a magnetic field of over 6 T, in line with the Company’s underwritten performance requirements. Future campaigns to continue to validate the robustness of this coil include quench survivability and additional digital twin modeling.
This system operation follows the in-house superconducting magnet design and manufacturing at the Company’s headquarters in Kearny, NJ. The Company plans to open a second facility in 2026 to further scale the manufacturing of its shaping coils. Thea Energy’s stellarator magnets are smaller, simpler and can be fully wound in tension. The Thea Energy team iterated over 50 generations of its planar coil magnets in-house over the past year and a half.
“We founded Thea Energy to unlock a simpler way to build the stellarator, and the team has now proven that by successfully designing, building, and operating multiple magnet hardware systems in a matter of a few years,” said David Gates, Ph.D., co-founder and chief technology officer of Thea Energy. “Eos will derisk the programmatic and executional aspects of ‘Helios’, our first fusion power plant, and now we have verified Eos-spec shaping coil magnets and the manufacturing technologies required to build and scale them. Our magnets are overwhelmingly easier to build compared to the complex ones used in prior generations of the stellarator. We are already starting to think about how to further scale manufacturing and quality assurance processes in our next phase. We look forward to completing additional operational campaigns that show the robustness of these magnets and sharing more on our breakthroughs with the industry.”
Thea Energy is building off the strong execution and success from its previous magnet array that confirmed smaller and simpler electromagnets can practically, precisely, and dynamically create and control stellarator-relevant magnetic fields. Those results can be found in IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity.
Brian Berzin, co-founder and chief executive officer of Thea Energy, added, “Our engineering philosophy centers on hardware that is designed for manufacturability, constructability, maintenance, and long-term commercial operation. These magnets can be built and assembled at scale using basic, cost-effective manufacturing technologies. For fusion to deliver baseload power at scale, the hardware must be streamlined and reproducible. This latest milestone confirms that our core magnet technology meets those exact criteria, paving the way for commercialization.”
About Thea Energy, Inc.
Thea Energy, Inc. is commercializing scalable and economical fusion energy systems via its planar coil stellarator architecture. Thea Energy’s stellarator power plants will uniquely provide an abundant and safe source of zero-emission energy for the future of humanity. The Company has utilized arrays of mass-manufacturable magnets and dynamic software controls to reinvent the stellarator.
Thea Energy spun out of Princeton University and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 2022 to commercialize the stellarator, a mature magnetic confinement fusion architecture. The Company was selected as an inaugural awardee of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program following a detailed merit review process, and is also supported via six Department of Energy INFUSE awards. Thea Energy is currently collaborating with leading national labs, academic institutions, and industrial partners to commercialize fusion energy on the fastest and most efficient path.
To learn more about Thea Energy’s mission, visit thea.energy and follow us on LinkedIn and X.
Media Contact
Madeline Joanis
maddy@thea.energy
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