Over 25 Years
of Epic Innovation
at TAE

Norman Rostoker began working in the field of fusion energy in the early days of its development, becoming a leading researcher, beloved professor and founding father of the field of plasma physics over the course of his career.

TAE’s first meeting of investors was held in 1996. The company was founded in 1998, first as Colliding Beam Fusion Reactor Inc., then Tri Alpha Energy – named for the three helium atoms, or alpha particles, that are produced in a hydrogen-boron fusion reaction – before ultimately becoming TAE Technologies. TAE’s visionary group of co-founders includes Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, journalist Frank Braun, geneticist Andrew Conrad, notable actor and environmentalist Harry Hamlin, former Chairman and CEO of Hughes Aircraft Allen Puckett, Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg, Bechtel Corp. executive George Sealy, who also became the company’s first CEO, and entrepreneur Gerald Simmons.

TAE achieved its C-1 milestone of 1 ms of FRC duration at the end of 2004. This graph and note from then-CEO Dale Prouty annotated a commemorative plaque given to members of the team and early supporters of the company, to mark the occasion.

C-2U successfully combined a high-beta FRC plasma with intense high-power neutral beam injection, a significant advance toward the scientific validation of TAE’s advanced beam-driven FRC approach to fusion.

C-2U successfully combined a high-beta FRC plasma with intense high-power neutral beam injection, a significant advance toward the scientific validation of TAE’s advanced beam-driven FRC approach to fusion.

Plasmas are notoriously fickle and hard to manage, but TAE’s field-reversed configuration uses neutral beams to heat and stabilize plasma for optimal confinement.

Through ongoing experimentation and refinements, and in collaboration with Google’s AI / Machine Learning team, Norman was pushed to an impressive 70+ million degrees C—going above and beyond “hot enough.”

Investors from around the world supported these important milestones, and TAE counts among its shareholders visionary investors including Buchanan Investments, Vulcan, Enel, Venrock, NEA, Goldman Sachs, Wellcome Trust, and the Kuwait Investment Authority, as well as the family offices of Addison Fischer, Art Samberg, and Charles Schwab, among others. The success of Norman also attracted a new class of institutional and strategic investors to TAE, including Chevron, Google, Reimagined Ventures, Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, and TIFF Investment Management.

For decades, the prevailing approach for achieving extremely hot plasma temperatures in a Field-Reversed Configuration (FRC) device relied on collisions—essentially creating a supersonic boom of plasma. This is how Norman operated since its inception. In this approach, two plasma rings formed in the formation sections at opposite ends of the machine, and then were launched toward one another until they collided in Norman’s central vessel.

For years, scientists envisioned a way to streamline FRC plasma formation so that a machine could produce hot, stable plasmas without relying on this elaborate and expensive “crash” process. TAE has achieved this vision with a first-of-its-kind fusion prototype capable of producing an FRC plasma using only neutral beam injection.

In 2025, the team published results from this groundbreaking advancement in Nature Communications and introduced the world to this history-making machine, called Norm in honor of its smaller size compared to its predecessor, Norman.

Norm is able to create, heat and stabilize an FRC plasma directly in the center vessel, eliminating the need for plasma collisions and the complex formation sections once required to produce them. The result is a machine with roughly 50% less hardware, offering more efficient performance with a simpler, less expensive design.

In 2017, TAE announced that the patented accelerator-based advanced beam technology developed for fusion would be leveraged to launch a company to commercialize medical innovations: TAE Life Sciences. The technology is being used to develop Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT), a promising potential treatment for head and neck, glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), and other cancers that are difficult or impossible to treat with traditional methods. TAE Life Sciences aims to deploy this adapted accelerator-based neutron source, in addition to developing targeted pharmaceuticals, as part of a holistic clinical platform to advance the potential of BNCT as a practical, widely accessible cancer treatment.

TAE Life Sciences’ revolutionary neutron beam system will be sized to fit in typical hospital facilities to provide a minimally invasive, cellularly targeted particle therapy that is a cost-effective source for neutrons that can be precision tuned for variable applications.

The company’s first-of-its-kind platform is a foundational step toward building a complete clean energy ecosystem to support mass onboarding of electric vehicles and deployment of intermittent renewable energy as dispatchable power with battery energy storage systems. TAE Power Solutions’ proprietary ultrafast pulse charging technology and modular ACi technology address the most fundamental challenges to electric transportation and energy storage adoption by providing peak power output, lower levelized cost of storage, and longer battery life. With these innovations, TAE Power Solutions is poised to deliver a clean electric future where the world’s best power systems run on TAE’s technologies.

With 2025’s Norm breakthrough significantly reducing complexity, cost and development time, TAE is on a clear path for net energy output and the commercialization of hydrogen-boron fusion energy. The company’s NBI-only achievement has even shortened its commercial roadmap, performing at such a high capacity that TAE’s previously planned sixth generation machine, Copernicus, is no longer necessary.

Housed in a 100,000 square foot facility in California, Norm is planned to operate at 100 million degrees Celsius– putting TAE on track to reach net energy with its power plant prototype, Da Vinci.