Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing, bonus story of the week. Today on Forbes, Sam Altman's

Fusion Power startup is eyeing Trump's $500 billion AI play. Stargate, the $500 billion

effort to secure American AI supremacy for perpetuity, backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman and SoftBank founder

Masa Sun, among others, will require a gargantuan amount of energy to power it.

As it happens, Altman and Sun are backing a startup that says it can provide it.

It's a fusion energy company called Helion that has recently raised $425 million in a funding

round backed by SoftBank.

Prior to that, it banked $375 million from Altman, who serves as Helion's chairman.

It was the single largest investment check the AI billionaire has written so far.

And Microsoft, a Stargate partner, was the first company

to contract with Helion for a fusion power plant by 2028, a timeline that has some physicists

skeptical. Stargate has not yet selected an energy partner, though it is considering a few,

a person familiar with the effort told Forbes.

At the end of January, OpenAI issued a call on its behalf for, quote,

proposals for large contiguous power footprints in the United States.

OpenAI said it would select contracts by early April. The company declined to comment.

Helion's CEO, David Curtley, declined to comment on whether it was pursuing a contract with Stargate, though he noted it would be a great customer.

He told Forbes, quote, we founded Helion to provide this baseload, industrial scale, clean power,

and that's exactly perfect for data centers.

Referencing Stargate, he said, quote, we would be perfect for a

project like it. Microsoft and SoftBank declined to comment. Stargate is President Trump's most

ambitious AI announcement yet, a private partnership with plans to build massive data centers

...