British billionaire backs plans for European fusion giant
Yahoo Finance ·
British billionaire backs plans for European fusion giant James Titcomb Tue, 7 July 2026 at 10:32 am GMT-4 2 min read GOOGL British trading billionaire Alex Gerko has backed Europe's biggest nuclear fusion company as start-ups race to crack the holy grail of renewable energy. XTX Markets, Mr Gerko's trading firm, has led a €411m (£351m) investment round in Germany's Proxima Fusion. Google has also invested in the company, as has East X Ventures, the venture capital arm of British investment firm East X. Munich-based Proxima positions itself as Europe's champion in fusion energy against a raft of US companies seeking to crack the technology. The company says it hopes to successfully demonstrate fusion power in the early 2030s, paving the way for a commercial plant by the end of the decade. It is also seeking hundreds of millions of euros from German local and national government, seeking to reverse the country's historical aversion to nuclear power. The country shut down its last three nuclear fission sites in 2023. German energy giant RWE, with whom Proxima is planning to build a "stellarator" fusion plant in Bavaria, has also invested. Proxima said it was the largest ever investment in nuclear fusion in Europe. Fusion seeks to harness the process by which the sun releases energy to generate electricity, and is seen as potentially crucial to securing reliable renewable electricity. It comes with far less radioactive waste than existing fission plants. XTX Markets uses data centres that require vast amounts of electricity to power its algorithms. The company's venture capital arm said part of its aim is to develop alternative energy sources. It has also backed US nuclear companies X-Energy and Standard Nuclear. Mr Gerko's role at XTX has turned him into one of Britain's wealthiest men, with a fortune of £16bn. "Europe is racing with the United States and China to get to the first fusion power plant," said Francesco Sciortino, the chief executive of Proxima. "Proxima's financing demonstrates that Europe can not only invent breakthrough technologies, but also build globally competitive companies around them. Investors recognise both the urgency and the opportunity of what we're doing and are backing us to develop a generational energy technology company." The company has an office in Oxford as well as its Munich headquarters. Google, which has said it plans to spend up to $190bn (£142bn) on AI infrastructure this year, has invested in three fusion companies, and agreed to buy power from US start-up Commonwealth Energy Systems in the 2030s.
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