First Public Fusion Company Surges in Wall Street Trading Debut

General Fusion Group Ltd. surged in its first day of trading after merging with a blank-check firm, a sign of investors’ interest in the world’s first publicly listed nuclear fusion company.

(Bloomberg) — General Fusion Group Ltd. surged in its first day of trading after merging with a blank-check firm, a sign of investors’ interest in the world’s first publicly listed nuclear fusion company. General Fusion jumped 38% to $12.55 at 12:15 p.m. in New York in its debut following a merger with Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III, a special purpose acquisition company. That gives the Vancouver-based company a market value of more than $380 million, and it now has about $150 million in cash, including net proceeds from the transaction, according to a Monday statement.

General Fusion is working to build a fusion power plant, an ambitious goal for a process that’s never been achieved outside of a laboratory setting. Projections for when the US will deploy commercial fusion range from several years to at least a decade. Nevertheless, the prospect of achieving fusion is drawing investors who are eager to get a piece of energy companies positioning themselves to meet the demands of artificial intelligence data centers.

Going public gives the company access to a broader set of investors, according to Chief Executive Officer Greg Twinney. “The public markets are significantly larger than the private market for capital, and it’s also less crowded because we are the first,” Twinney said in an interview Monday. General Fusion, founded 2002, is betting on magnetized target fusion to harness the energy created when small atoms fuse into larger ones.

Fusion offers the possibility of abundant, clean electricity but comes with daunting engineering and physics challenges. —With assistance from Vonnie Quinn, Dani Burger and Thomas Seal.