AUSTIN, Texas, July 08, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NetworkNewsWire Editorial Coverage: No institution on earth burns more oil than the United States military, and that dependence has quietly become one of the most consequential strategic liabilities in modern defense. Every gallon that reaches a forward position requires a supply chain that adversaries can target at multiple points. The same underlying problem runs through civilian sectors: construction, water desalination, space exploration and telecommunications each operate in conditions where high-density reliable power is scarce, expensive or exposed to disruption. American Fusion(TM) Inc. (OTC: AMFN) (profile), through its wholly owned subsidiary Kepler Fusion(TM), is developing the Texatron(TM), a compact, aneutronic (little to no radiation), truck-deployable Fusion Engine(TM), which is capable of producing anywhere from 0.5 megawatt (“MW”) to more than 100 MW of clean power without turbines, steam cycles or vulnerable fuel logistics. If the technology succeeds, the company believes it can convert energy from an operational liability into a portable, self-sufficient asset for both military and commercial customers. American Fusion is focused on strengthening its footprint within a broader ecosystem that includes established energy and infrastructure leaders such as Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. (NYSE: BEP), Enphase Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: ENPH), Fluence Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: FLNC) and Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (NASDAQ: DJT).

• The petroleum footprint of the U.S. armed forces is difficult to overstate.
• American Fusion is now advancing its 5 MW preproduction Texatron through testing and validation, with engineering and production underway for 10 MW and 20 MW follow-on systems.
• The energy problems that define military vulnerability show up in essentially identical form across several civilian sectors, and American Fusion’s power-as-a-service commercial model brings the company’s proprietary technology to multiple verticals without demanding customers carry the full cost of ownership.
• Rather than converting fuel to heat to motion to electricity, the Texatron system generates current directly from charged particles exerting pressure against its own magnetic field.
• A structural shift is underway in how governments, militaries and industries think about power, moving away from centralized generation and fixed grid dependency toward distributed, high-density energy systems that can operate wherever they’re needed without fixed infrastructure.
  
  

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Fuel Is the Hidden Weapon

The petroleum footprint of the U.S. armed forces is difficult to overstate. Data indicates that American military branches burn through roughly 4.6 billion gallons of fuel annually, a volume large enough that if the Pentagon were its own country, it would place among the top 60 oil consumers globally. Within the U.S. Department of Defense (“DoD”), the Air Force carries the heaviest burden, consuming an estimated two billion gallons of aviation fuel each year, a figure that represents close to 81% of the service branch’s total energy use. Other estimates put annual Air Force consumption as high as 2.4 to 2.6 billion gallons depending on operational tempo and fiscal year.

This demand does not ease during periods of geopolitical tension. Rather, it intensifies. The disruption to crude flows through the Strait of Hormuz reinforced a point defense analysts have raised for years: The same machines the United States relies on to project power abroad are the ones most exposed when fuel supply chains come under pressure. A U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings article warned that any future Pacific conflict would expose the entire logistics chain, from forward units to domestic refineries, to attack at every stage. The vulnerability is not hypothetical.

The 2022 National Defense Strategy formally recognizes energy resilience as a priority, directing the DoD to pursue technologies that reduce petroleum reliance, cut convoy requirements and supply reliable power to forward bases independent of fixed supply lines. American Fusion’s Texatron Fusion Engine is an effort to build a platform that addresses a portion of this future demand. The company’s emphasis on modular design, compact form factor and distributed power generation tracks closely with the trends now transforming both defense and civilian energy planning.

Support Without the Supply Chain

The operational logic of compact fusion in a defense context is uncomplicated. A convoy that never runs cannot be ambushed. A forward base that produces its own electricity needs no petroleum supply chain.

At scale, the economics of energy self-sufficiency compound quickly. Electric Choice’s analysis of military energy consumption notes that fully loaded delivery costs for fuel reaching remote combat zones can reach $400 per gallon. Replacing that recurring expenditure with on-site generation reframes energy from a perpetual logistics cost into a capital asset deployed once.

The Texatron is engineered for exactly that role. American Fusion describes a fast-pulsed Torsatron design that converts charged particles pressing against magnetic fields directly into electricity. By removing turbines and steam cycles from the process entirely, the architecture avoids the mechanical complexity and physical bulk that make conventional power systems difficult to deploy in austere or contested environments.

The system burns deuterium-helium-3 fuel, an aneutronic combination that generates minimal to no radiation and requires far less shielding than conventional fission-based nuclear approaches. The practical result is a unit compact enough for truck transport, stackable for modular scaling and capable of producing clean power across a range of output levels and sufficient to support a forward operating base, a naval installation or a mobile command facility.

American Fusion is now advancing its 5 MW preproduction Texatron through testing and validation, with engineering and production underway for 10 MW and 20 MW follow-on systems. The company’s technology roadmap covers ongoing facility expansion in north Texas, continued preproduction development, active patent filings and planned university collaboration discussions. Near-term engineering objectives include pulse-fusion testing through the summer and higher-performance milestones later in the year, all subject to successful testing, financing, engineering and regulatory progress.

Intellectual property development runs in parallel with hardware progress. The company’s patent efforts span plasma confinement, electromagnetic field generation, reactor architecture, direct energy conversion, fuel delivery, diagnostics, control systems, manufacturing methods and modular deployment. While no patent application carries a guarantee of issuance, American Fusion anticipates its portfolio will grow substantially as development advances across each of these disciplines.

Beyond the Battlefield

The energy problems that define military vulnerability, including unreliable supply, high delivery cost and exposure to disruption, show up in essentially identical form across several civilian sectors. If compact fusion technology reaches commercial deployment, it could contribute to a range of long-term national priorities: military energy resilience, reduced dependence on vulnerable fuel logistics, enhanced critical infrastructure reliability, support for AI-driven industrial expansion, domestic advanced manufacturing and lower emissions in specific applications.

Each of those priorities represents a discrete potential market with its own procurement structure and timeline. Driving all of them is the AI infrastructure buildout, which is generating energy demand at a pace that existing generation and grid capacity were not designed to meet. Goldman Sachs Research reports that data center power consumption will rise 160% by 2030, fueled predominantly by AI workloads. The International Energy Agency estimates that global data center electricity use could more than double by the same year, reaching consumption comparable to Japan’s entire national grid. The ripple effect touches every industry where energy reliability is operationally critical.

American Fusion’s power-as-a-service commercial model brings the company’s proprietary technology to multiple verticals without demanding customers carry the full cost of ownership. Data centers and industrial operators have been identified as primary near-term commercial targets alongside defense. Building across multiple sectors insulates the company from dependence on any single procurement pathway and creates parallel routes to commercialization; success in one market generates operational evidence that can accelerate uptake in the next.

The broader fusion energy market offers significant long-term context. According to the Business Research Company, the market is expected to increase from roughly $288 billion in 2025 to $311 billion in 2026 at an 8% CAGR, reaching $419.84 billion by 2030. Maximize Market Research forecasts a 7.4% CAGR through 2032, while Market Research Future projects a higher-end CAGR of 19.38% through 2034 for the emerging commercial fusion segment. The spread across these projections reflects a market transitioning from scientific ambition to active commercial investment as multiple approaches close in on demonstration milestones.

Efficiency Reimagined

Virtually every power generation system in widespread use today follows the same basic sequence: Fuel is burned to produce heat, heat converts water to steam, steam spins a turbine and the turbine drives a generator. Each handoff in that chain bleeds energy. The overall conversion efficiency of traditional thermal power generation typically falls between 33% and 45%, which means the majority of the energy locked in the original fuel never reaches the end user as electricity. That loss rate has defined industrial power generation for well over a century.

The Texatron is based on different physics. Rather than converting fuel to heat to motion to electricity, the system generates current directly from charged particles exerting pressure against its own magnetic field. Eliminating the turbine and steam cycle removes the primary sources of thermodynamic loss. The result is a direct energy conversion architecture that theoretically supports efficiencies above 90%, more than twice what conventional thermal systems achieve at their best.

The downstream consequences of that efficiency gap are substantial. A system converting over 90% of its fuel energy into electricity requires far less input fuel to deliver equivalent power output. It produces less waste heat, demands less cooling infrastructure and can be built smaller and lighter than a thermal-cycle system of comparable capacity. For military deployment contexts where weight and logistical complexity are hard constraints, those characteristics are operationally meaningful, not merely attractive.

The Texatron’s Torsatron coil architecture contributes further to its practical deployability. Unlike the Tokamak and Stellarator designs that dominate large-scale fusion research programs, a Torsatron runs all coils in the same current direction, reducing electromagnetic stress and simplifying manufacturing. Kepler Fusion has confirmed that prototype Version 9 has already undergone testing in Texas, with additional testing planned through the summer. The simplicity of the coil geometry supports the modularity and scalability central to American Fusion’s goal of producing units compact enough to fit in the bed of a pickup truck, a design objective that would have been unimaginable in the era of first-generation fusion research.

Off-Grid Is the New Standard

A structural shift is underway in how governments, militaries and industries think about power. The direction of travel is away from centralized generation and fixed grid dependency toward distributed, high-density energy systems that can operate wherever they’re needed without fixed infrastructure. AI infrastructure investment, geopolitical disruption, climate-driven grid stress and the growing autonomy requirements of next-generation military platforms are all pushing in the same direction simultaneously.

A McKinsey report on energy demand in the United States outlines an environment in which demand growth is not gradual or evenly distributed but arrives in concentrated surges driven by AI adoption, industrial reshoring and electrification. ICF’s analysis describes a widening gap between the speed of new demand and the pace at which conventional grid infrastructure can respond. Transmission projects require years of permitting and years more of construction. Centralized power cannot flex at the tempo that modern defense and industrial operations now require. On-site generation is not a workaround; it is increasingly the only architecture that keeps pace.

The military dimension of this shift is sharpening as the nature of warfare evolves. Future operations will depend heavily on autonomous platforms, such as unmanned surface vessels, ground robots and aerial systems, with each requiring continuous, dependable power over extended durations. Distributed command-and-control networks add further demand. The energy requirements of this emerging operational model cannot be met by petroleum logistics chains that are themselves high-value targets. The future battlefield needs power infrastructure that travels with the force.

American Fusion remains a prerevenue company in the development stage. The risks are real: Precommercial technology carries inherent uncertainty, OTC market liquidity is limited and continued financing is required to reach commercialization. What has changed is the clarity of the market the company is building toward. The DoD carries a documented mandate to cut petroleum dependency. Civilian energy markets face demand increases that existing supply cannot meet at the required pace. Institutional capital is flowing into the fusion energy sector as competing approaches advance toward demonstration.

American Fusion’s differentiated aneutronic approach, modular design philosophy and expanding IP foundation position it within a market growing more valuable each quarter. If its engineering objectives are achieved through successful testing, validation and commercialization, compact fusion could become a meaningful contributor to future military readiness, industrial energy supply and long-term national energy resilience.

Energy Innovation Gains Momentum

The global energy sector continues to evolve as companies invest in technologies and infrastructure designed to meet rising electricity demand while improving reliability, efficiency and long-term sustainability. Recent developments highlight growing momentum behind renewable generation, advanced energy storage, next-generation power infrastructure and emerging clean-energy technologies, reflecting a broader transformation in how energy will be produced, delivered and consumed in the decades ahead.

Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P. (NYSE: BEP) announced an agreement to acquire Boralex, a Canadian publicly listed renewable power platform. According to the announcement, Boralex has more than 4,000 megawatts of operating and under-construction wind, solar, hydro and battery storage assets and an ~8,000 megawatt development pipeline diversified across Canada, France, the United States and the United Kingdom. The acquisition further strengthens the company’s position in several high-value markets with significant barriers to entry, including Canada, where the complementary portfolio enables Brookfield to do more in the highly attractive and growing market.

Enphase Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: ENPH) has joined the Open Compute Project (“OCP”) Foundation as a Platinum member. Through its membership, Enphase expects to participate in OCP's community efforts to develop open standards for next-generation data center power infrastructure, including emerging higher-voltage direct current rack power architectures for AI workloads. The OCP Foundation is a leading open-source community advancing data center technology, bringing together hyperscalers, suppliers and innovators to share designs and best practices across power, cooling, networking and other strategic areas.

Fluence Energy Inc. (NASDAQ: FLNC) introduced Smartstack(TM) 10 MWh, the latest expansion of its Smartstack platform. The new 10 MWh system joins the existing 7.5 MWh, expanding the platform's capacity options to meet evolving, mission-critical project needs. As the latest evolution of Fluence's scalable, standardized platform, this new system delivers expanded capacity and industry-leading site-level density while maintaining the electrical architecture, footprint and deployment model customers rely on across the Smartstack platform.

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. (“TMTG”) (NASDAQ: DJT) is focused on completing its previously announced merger with TAE Technologies Inc., a leading fusion power company. According to the company, the goal is to close the transaction in 4Q 2026 or sooner. The merger would create one of the world’s first publicly traded fusion companies and would combine TMTG’s access to significant capital and TAE’s leading fusion technology. The announcement noted that the combined company plans to site and begin construction on the world’s first utility-scale fusion power plant (50 MWe), subject to required approvals.

These milestones underscore an industry that is rapidly adapting to changing energy needs through strategic investment and technological innovation. As demand from electrification, artificial intelligence, data centers and industrial growth continues to expand, companies advancing scalable, resilient and forward-looking energy solutions are expected to play an increasingly important role in shaping the future global energy landscape.

For more information, visit American Fusion.

Forward-Looking Statement
This article contains forward-looking statements regarding American Fusion's technology development, product concepts, commercialization plans, market opportunities, engineering objectives, and potential applications. These statements are based on current expectations and involve risks and uncertainties. The Texatron™ Fusion Engine™ remains under development, and future milestones, performance characteristics, commercialization, regulatory approvals, financing, and market adoption are subject to numerous factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed herein. Nothing in this white paper should be construed as a guarantee of technical performance or commercial success.

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