Honestly, the more I look into Helion the more it seems like it's a lot of marketing/PR nonsense. But I'm in no way a fusion expert so I guess I'll just see what happens
The thing about Helion is their approach to fusion isn't the miniature star approach of the tokamaks but more of a first principles approach. Think airplanes and helicopters versus ornithopters.
Instead of trying to maintain a mini star, super hot plasma stable long enough to extract useful heat, the Helion system uses pulsing electromagnetic forces to collide plasma clouds to generate energy and extract the generated energy. (rather like an electromagnetic diesel-style engine). Its not reliant on thermodynamic cycles or long containment times but on many tiny fusion "explosions" in sequence.
Much like the Farnsworth fusors and Bussard Polywell wiffle balls, their approach already works, but haven't yet produced enough energy to be useful. They need to scale up their device pulse rates successfully to produce more energy than they consume rather than grow physically bigger or increase containment times. To date their prototypes have scaled according to theory. They may or not succeed but they haven't failed yet.
The PR hype is actually necessary because, remember, it is a private tech startup rather than a multinational jobs program like ITER or a government lab project. They need to lure investor support them with the promise of big profits and in today's economic environment venture capital is harder to raise for anything other than "AI".
Whatever they have, they convinced to sign up for *production* output, with economic penalties if they don't deliver.
Microsoft is looking into nuclear energy as a plausible option for its AI ventures.
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