Overview
- On Monday, September 14, 2026 the UK and US signed two linked accords at the Global Fusion Summit that create a formal supercomputing partnership between UK Atomic Energy Authority and Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and a joint statement on aligning fusion regulation.
- The technical plan — dubbed the SUNRISE–STELLAR-AI federation — would connect the UK’s SUNRISE and PPPL’s STELLAR-AI systems so teams can train the same AI models on data from two spherical tokamaks, MAST Upgrade and NSTX-U, to build digital twins and improve prediction of plasma behaviour.
- The governments framed the move as an investor signal, with ministers projecting more than 10,000 UK jobs by 2030 and publishing a UK Fusion Investment Prospectus to attract private capital for supply chains and STEP programme testing.
- The announcements also included near-term funding commitments: a £2.63 million UK–US materials collaboration led by the University of Birmingham and Electric Power Research Institute, plus up to £3 million from Kyoto Fusioneering for Project ALBION.
- The federation is not yet operational and partners are still resolving technical interoperability, data sharing, governance and workflow routing before models and workloads can move freely across the two systems, making implementation the key next step to watch.