UT Austin team wins support to accelerate fusion research with AI

By Erick León

Event / source date: October 16, 2026

AUSTIN, Texas — A UT Austin-led team has been selected for Google.org’s AI for Science challenge to develop faster computational tools for fusion energy research.

The university announced three years of support for work on stellarators, complex reactor designs whose shapes are expensive to evaluate through repeated simulations.

The researchers plan to build surrogate models that make those calculations faster and less costly. Collaborators include the University of Washington and New York University.

The project is one of 17 organizations sharing a combined $36 million award pool; that total is not the amount awarded to UT alone. The work concerns research and reactor design, not a newly operating commercial fusion power plant.

Source: UT News / Oden Institute. English summary by Noticias La Paz.

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