Nuclear fusion may be years away from commercial adoption, but investors can now buy into a company that's trying to harness it in new kinds of reactors.

On Monday, Canadian company General Fusion Group, which has raised money from Jeff Bezos, started trading under the symbol GFUZ. The shares closed 21% higher, at $11.

Previously, it traded under the name of a shell company, as is typical with special purpose acquisition companies. General Fusion went public by merging with the shell company last week to become the first fusion pure play to trade on public markets. Even in the best-case scenario, it might take a decade to pay off for investors. The company is aiming to have its first commercial reactor up and running by 2035, CEO Greg Twinney told Barron's on Monday.

General Fusion, founded in 2002, is one of the oldest fusion companies. Bezos first invested in 2011. It's gone through some struggles, laying off 25% of its staff last year and reaching out to investors for more money. But Twinney said going public changes its fortunes. It allowed General Fusion to raise $150 million, enough to sustain it through 2028, when the company expects to have achieved enough scientific breakthroughs that raising money will get easier, he said.

It built its first fusion machine in Vancouver, and it now needs to ramp up tests during which the interior of the machine will get as hot as 100 million degrees Celsius. Twinney said General Fusion's advantage over other fusion companies is that it uses readily available hardware such as steam-driven pistons for its machines instead of superconducting magnets and lasers. "It makes it more economical, because you're not using exotic materials," he said.

Investing in General Fusion is a speculative bet on a form of energy that hasn't been put to use yet anywhere in the world. Every nuclear plant in use today is powered by fission, the energy generated when the nucleus of an atom breaks apart. Fusion, by comparison, generates energy from combining nuclei, replicating the reaction in the sun. If successful, fusion is expected to generate much more energy than fission in even smaller reactors, and potentially with fewer risks.

But getting there is likely to take several more years, if not decades. In 2022, a government lab in California successfully generated more energy from a fusion reaction than it took to power the lasers that triggered the reaction. But the experiment did not point to a clear way to commercializing the technology, and companies haven't yet equaled the government lab's feat.

Tech companies are hoping to accelerate the development of fusion reactors, which could be one solution to the enormous power needs of their artificial-intelligence data centers. OpenAI's Sam Altman has backed a fusion outfit called Helion, and Google put money behind privately held TAE Technologies, a California company that announced last year that it will merge with Trump Media and Technology Group in an all-stock deal worth more than $6 billion. That deal could close later this year.

Write to Avi Salzman at avi.salzman@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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July 13, 2026 16:55 ET (20:55 GMT)

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