Powering the Next Industrial Era | Eric Schmidt, Bob Mumgaard | USA House

Fusion energy has been the technology of tomorrow for six decades. Eric Schmidt and Bob Mumgaard came to USA House Davos 2026 to argue that the wait is nearly over, and that the decisions made in the next few years will determine who controls the most consequential energy technology in human history.

Mumgaard, co-founder and CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, opens with a simple but arresting definition: fusion is a machine that makes energy, as much as you want, wherever you want, from fuel that will never run out and produces no long-lived waste or emissions. He calls it deeply sovereign energy, and frames the shift from fossil fuels to fusion as going from the hunter-gatherer mode of energy to something fundamentally different. In 2022, a U.S. national lab machine achieved fusion ignition for the first time, producing more energy than it consumed. Commonwealth, backed by nearly $3 billion including Google, is now targeting the first commercial fusion power plant in Virginia in the early 2030s.

Schmidt, who chairs both Relativity Space and Commonwealth's investor group, frames the stakes in terms he knows intimately from the AI world: just as only a handful of companies can afford the $50 billion it takes to train frontier AI models and build the data centers behind them, fusion may consolidate to two or three serious competitors globally. He wants more competition, not less, and argues the capital requirements make that outcome hard to guarantee.

Their joint ask to the room is concrete: the Fusion Industry Association has a $10 billion proposal before the U.S. government, the same order of magnitude as the semiconductor research funding in the CHIPS Act, that would get construction started on the first generation of fusion power plants within the current administration. Their message to sovereign wealth funds, sitting on patient long-term capital, was even more direct: come talk to us.

Recorded onsite at USA Davos 2026

Eric Schmidt

Bob Mumgaard

Vijay Vaitheeswaran

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