Some of the most prominent billionaires in the Information Technology (IT) industry such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Marc Benioffwhose history goes back to Amazon, Microsoft, Open AI and Salesforce have started pouring their money into nuclear fusion projects.
There is a clear trigger for this unexpected turn and it is that, if we remember a bit, we will remember that at the beginning of this year 2023 the scientific community officially signed up for an important historical achievement by achieving nuclear fusion for the first time with a gain in energy. net.
That kind of balance was possible in theory, but had not been achieved for decades. However, on December 5 of last year, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratoryin California, managed to generate more energy than was spent in a meltdown, making the achievement official in January 2023.
To achieve this milestone, the scientists behind this project directed 192 lasers aimed at a target the size of a kid, popcorn or popcorn.
It was a capsule with deuteron and triton that with the energy of the lasers reached 3 million degrees Celsius, thus generating a clean nuclear fusion and thus culminating more than 60 years of research to verify that this kind of process was possible.
Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and more bet their money on nuclear fusion
After coming up with the formula that showed that it was possible to achieve this nuclear fusion generating a complete energy gain immediately, some of the biggest figures in Silicon Valley signed up to invest in projects that seek to take this achievement to the next level.
It’s like the Wall Street Journal has published an interesting article where they map how Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, Bill Gates, the man who gave birth to Microsoft, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, Vinod Khoslay, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have started investing in that sector.
The best example described in the research piece is the story of Sam Altman, owner of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, who has invested USD $375 million in Helion, a company that implements a technology called magneto-inertial fusion that seeks to equally produce energy with net gain this 2024.
Fusion has long been considered one of the best clean energy alternatives to sources that burn fossil fuels and release greenhouse gases.
It seems that a new era is about to begin in this sector and the IT moguls want front row seats.