Trump Media to Merge With TAE Technologies, a Nuclear Fusion Firm, in a $6 Billion Deal

Trump Media & Technology Group, the social media and crypto company part owned by President Trump, said it would help develop a “utility-scale fusion power plant.”

President Trump’s social media company, which recently expanded into streaming and cryptocurrency, is now entering its fourth act: fusion power, a promising but still unproven source of alternative energy.

Trump Media & Technology Group and TAE Technologies, a fusion power company, said Thursday they had agreed to an all-stock merger that the companies valued at more than $6 billion.

The deal would be a metamorphosis for Trump Media, the money-losing parent company of Truth Social, a social media platform that has struggled to gain market share beyond serving as the main online megaphone for President Trump. Mr. Trump is the company’s largest shareholder, with a large stake worth more than $1 billion that is held in a trust managed by his eldest son, Donald Jr., who is a Trump Media board member. The company, based in Sarasota, Fla., has only a few dozen full-time employees and has recorded tens of millions of dollars in losses in recent years.

The merger with TAE would create one of the world’s first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies, according to a news release. The companies said they intend to begin construction on the first “utility-scale fusion power plant” next year, with plans to build additional plants in the future.

Some tech companies are looking at fusion, a still-experimental technology, as a clean energy source that could help feed the electricity thirst of artificial intelligence data centers. The merged company hopes to become a leader in that effort and get a leg up by going public, which could make it easier to raise new investor capital in the future.

Producing energy through nuclear fusion, the process that powers stars, is a long-elusive dream among scientists. Fusion uses fuels that are abundant, eliminates the risk of meltdowns and produces no long-term radioactive waste. It could produce power that is free of carbon emissions and available around the clock.

Government laboratories have achieved several tantalizing demonstrations of fusion’s potential in recent years. But the process is enormously complicated to initiate and control, and developing machines that can do it consistently and affordably enough to power a grid could require technological advancements that have yet to be made, and perhaps even materials that have yet to be invented.

“We’ve got the tools and the tech and the engineering,” Michl Binderbauer, the chief executive of TAE, said in an interview. “What we were lacking was the capital.”

With its publicly traded stock, Trump Media is providing the means for TAE, a private company, to enter the public markets.

Trump Media brings a host of opportunities and also potential complications to the fusion company. The merger is the latest example of the muddled interests of the Trump administration and those of Mr. Trump’s personal business ventures.

Trump Media is getting into the nuclear business at a time when Mr. Trump’s administration has sought to speed approvals of nuclear power plants, though most of those efforts have focused on conventional fission technology.

In May, Mr. Trump signed executive orders aimed at streamlining reactor approvals, revising safety rules and siting reactors on federal lands. In June, he fired a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that oversees the industry, without providing a reason.

The deal also puts Mr. Trump in competition, indirectly, with other companies looking to fuel and profit from the A.I. revolution. Companies tied to A.I. have fueled a surge in the stock market this year, but also have raised concerns that the technology could eliminate jobs in scores of industries.

Mr. Trump’s family is already heavily involved with crypto, where the Trump administration has also taken steps to reduce regulatory oversight.

Months before this foray into fusion power, Trump Media raised $2.5 billion to invest in Bitcoin, and is also working to bring crypto-related exchange traded funds, or E.T.F.s, to market.

For now, Trump Media and TAE are not saying much about their plans beyond the news release announcing the deal. In an eight-minute call for investors on Thursday morning, during which the speakers took no questions, Devin Nunes, the chief executive of Trump Media, said the merger fulfilled the company’s “America First principles” and said it was “ideally positioned” to usher in the fusion energy revolution.

“Fusion power will lower energy prices, bolster our national defense and secure the energy needed to guarantee America’s dominance of A.I. technology,” he said.

Mr. Nunes, a former California Republican congressman, also serves as chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and was one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters in Congress during Mr. Trump’s first term in office.

The proposed deal would have to be approved by Trump Media shareholders. It is unclear if the merger would need additional regulatory approval beyond basic clearance by securities regulators.

Several fusion start-ups now say they are close to building commercial plants. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a spinoff from research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is aiming to build and generate power from a plant in Chesterfield County, Va., in the early 2030s. Helion Energy, a start-up backed by the OpenAI chief Sam Altman, has started building a fusion plant in Washington State that is expected to supply power to Microsoft data centers by 2028.

TAE’s fusion technology differs from its competitors’ in the fuel its reactors would use. The company says this will make its reactors simpler to operate and maintain, helping to lower the cost of the electricity they generate. Still, as with all approaches to fusion, translating TAE’s technology into a commercial power plant has been no small task.

“We have the science solved,” Mr. Binderbauer said, adding that the company’s latest prototype is about the size of two double-decker buses. He said a utility-scale project would cost “in the billions.”

TAE, originally called Tri Alpha Energy, was founded in 1998. Some of its early backers included the astronaut Buzz Aldrin; the actor and environmentalist Harry Hamlin; and Allen Puckett, a former chairman of Hughes Aircraft, according to the company’s website.

The companies said in the release that TAE had built five fusion reactors and raised more than $1.3 billion over the years, mostly recently in a June funding round backed by Chevron and Google, among others. The British government recently announced a joint venture with TAE on fusion technology.

China is investing heavily in fusion research as part of its efforts to power more of its economy with clean sources. Government and private investors poured $2.1 billion this year into a new, state-owned fusion company in Shanghai, and government labs are building cutting-edge facilities for fusion experiments.

The United States, by contrast, has focused its fusion efforts on supporting the growth of the private fusion industry, rather than expanding federally funded research initiatives.

If the merger is completed, Trump Media plans to provide up to $300 million to TAE Technologies, and shareholders of both companies would each own approximately 50 percent of the combined company. Mr. Nunes and Mr. Binderbauer would be co-chief executives of the combined company. Donald Trump Jr. would remain on the board.

Trump Media came into existence in early 2021. Later that year, it announced a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp., a public shell company. It took well over two years for Trump Media to complete its merger, as the deal was held up by a regulatory investigation into whether some people associated with Digital World had engaged in improper merger talks.

Truth Social has struggled to gain advertising dollars, and its once high-flying stock has been flagging: It was down more than 60 percent this year before the announcement.

The fusion-power deal announcement on Thursday provided a jolt, pushing up the company’s stock by 42 percent, to close at $14.86 a share.

Raymond Zhong contributed reporting.

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