14/09/2026
The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have joined forces to link their advanced fusion supercomputing platforms, using artificial intelligence to accelerate fusion energy’s development.
At the Global Fusion Policy Summit held in London today, UKAEA and PPPL, the UK’s and one of the US’s leading national fusion laboratories, signed a Joint Declaration of Intent to explore linking UKAEA’s SUNRISE mission-focused AI supercomputer with PPPL’s STELLAR-AI platform through a partnership known as the SUNRISE–STELLAR-AI Federation.
The Global Fusion Policy Summit aims to increase regulatory harmonisation, crucial to achieve safe and secure fusion energy, and create certainty for developers and investors.
The federation would connect UKAEA’s SUNRISE fusion-focused supercomputer with PPPL’s STELLAR-AI platform, enabling researchers on both sides of the Atlantic to train AI models on results from both national laboratories and develop AI tools for future fusion power plants.
The collaboration would draw on experiments completed using UKAEA’s MAST Upgrade facility in Oxfordshire and PPPL’s NSTX-U facility in New Jersey.
The federation will mean both advanced computers will be used to train the same AI models, which need large volumes of high-quality data to make accurate predictions.
By combining supercomputing power and expertise, the federation aims to shorten the design cycle for future fusion power plants, make better use of existing experiments, and give the next generation of fusion scientists on both sides of the Atlantic a shared platform to build on.
Joe Milnes, Executive Director for Engineering and Computing at UKAEA, said:
“Fusion is one of the great scientific and engineering challenges of our time. To solve these challenges, fusion needs partnerships. The US and UK are two global leaders in fusion research, and the federation of SUNRISE and STELLAR-AI would build on a long history of transatlantic cooperation to further advance fusion development.”
Jonathan Menard, Chief Scientist at PPPL, said:
“A fusion power plant is one of the most complex machines humanity has ever tried to build and no single laboratory or nation will design it alone. By federating the SUNRISE and STELLAR-AI computer platforms, we can train AI on data from two leading fusion facilities, test ideas across two of the most capable computing systems in the world that are designed for fusion research, and accelerate the path to a compact fusion power plant.”
Rob Akers, Director of Computing Programmes and Senior Fellow at UKAEA, said:
“UKAEA and PPPL would draw on experimental data from two world-leading fusion machines, using simulation to fill the gaps and extend those datasets into regimes we have yet to explore. Together, we can develop digital twins of both machines to support the design of future fusion power plants, creating models of spherical tokamaks that are more predictive, more actionable and ultimately more useful to fusion engineers. The real power will come from working as one team. Together, we can learn faster and learn more, extracting maximum insight. The computing and international collaboration will help us accelerate the journey from today’s experiments to tomorrow’s fusion power plants.
Shantenu Jha, Head of Computational Sciences at PPPL, said:
“Our goal is to let models and experiments move freely between the two systems. We will turn a collection of supercomputers into a single engine for fusion discovery.”
Read the full press release here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-and-us-fusion-supercomputers-to-be-linked-across-atlantic
