Physics, Deep Tech

UK and US universities join forces to speed up fusion power

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September 21, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

A commitment to future fusion energy development was formalized on Monday, September 14, 2026, when representatives signed a Memorandum of Understanding at the Mansion House in London. The agreement establishes a transatlantic partnership between the University Fusion Association and a coalition of 16 UK universities, including The University of Manchester, to accelerate research and build a skilled workforce.

This collaboration prioritizes developing a robust, inclusive, and diverse talent pipeline for the fusion sector over the next decade and beyond, according to the agreement, with a focus on research, skills, policy, and economic impact. “Delivering fusion will require collaboration across academia, industry, and government,” said David Capper, Director for Net Zero Buildings, Clean Heat UK Department for Energy Security & Net Zero.

Memorandum of Understanding Advances US-UK Fusion Research

This structure is designed to be expansive, with provisions for additional universities to join the initiative in the coming months, broadening the scope of transatlantic cooperation. The agreement also addresses economic impact, aiming to foster entrepreneurship and create pathways for translating research into tangible economic benefits. Shared values emphasizing research integrity, ethical conduct, and the wellbeing of students and trainees involved in fusion research anchor these efforts.

The collaborative framework outlined in the MoU encompasses research, innovation, and policy, with an emphasis on collegiality to support career development within the global fusion community. Universities have an important role in making fusion possible, and we welcome partnerships like the one being forged today.” By uniting leading academic institutions, the agreement intends to accelerate technical breakthroughs and cultivate the next generation of fusion scientists and engineers, strengthening the global fusion energy landscape.

Delivering fusion will require collaboration across academia, industry, and government, alongside a strong pipeline of skills and talent.

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Avatar of Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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