Eastern Superconductor Supplies All the Tape for a Record 10.3 T Chinese Stellarator Coil
Eastern Superconductor (东部超导) supplied all of the rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) tape in a high-temperature superconducting (HTS) stellarator model coil that reached a peak field of 10.3 T, which the company says is the strongest yet recorded by a Chinese HTS stellarator model coil. The coil belongs to BlueStar Fusion (蔚蓝恒星), a fusion developer founded a year ago, and the two companies have tied the result to a commitment covering thousands of kilometres of tape over the next two years. For a tape producer, that commitment is the commercially significant half of the announcement.
A 10.3 T model coil gives the tape its proof point
A stellarator is one of the two main designs for holding fusion plasma inside a magnetic field. A tokamak drives a large electric current through the plasma itself to help generate that field. A stellarator generates the entire field from external coils instead, wound into complicated three-dimensional shapes. Dispensing with the plasma current removes one of the obstacles to running a machine continuously, but it moves the difficulty into the magnets, which have to be built to demanding shape tolerances while the conductor inside them carries its full current. A model coil is a single coil built at full scale to prove that can be done before an entire machine is committed.
On 14 August 2026 Eastern Superconductor announced that BlueStar Fusion had completed testing of an HTS stellarator model coil under real operating conditions, cooled with cold helium gas and by conduction. The coil reached a peak field of 10.3 T, and Eastern Superconductor supplied all of the REBCO tape in it.
In limit-current testing the coil carried more than twice its normal operating current, which the company presents as a wide engineering safety margin, and it reached its design operating current several times. Eastern Superconductor describes the result as moving the HTS stellarator from verification of critical components toward full-machine engineering.
Thousands of kilometres over two years turn capacity into contracted volume
The announcement pairs the test with a long-term strategic supply relationship: thousands of kilometres of HTS tape over the next two years, with joint research on key technologies alongside it. Agreements of this shape are what convert REBCO tape output into revenue against a named machine, and they follow the pattern set when Faraday Factory Japan signed up Proxima Fusion on the same stellarator route in 2025. Fusion is one of the few end markets able to take tape in these volumes, alongside the grid and data centre uses on our applications page.
The buyer is a year-old company aiming at a full device in 2027
BlueStar Fusion was founded in August 2025 and has a team of nearly 100 people. It has closed three consecutive financing rounds at 100-million-yuan scale, most recently a several-hundred-million-yuan angel+ round announced in early August 2026 at a post-money valuation above RMB 3 billion. The company plans to build a fully high-temperature superconducting stellarator by 2027, which sets the delivery schedule the tape supply has to meet.
Eastern Superconductor sells fusion-grade tape made by MOCVD
HF1200 is one model in the company’s HF series, the tape line it builds for controlled fusion and supplies in kilometre-class continuous lengths. Tape for fusion is a distinct product because it is judged on the current it carries at low temperature in a strong magnetic field, rather than at 77 K in self-field where tape performance is usually quoted. The length announced in September 2025 shows both measures: 1,107 m at 12 mm width, with an average critical current of 424 A at 77 K in self-field, and samples from its two ends measuring 1,299 A and 1,340 A at 20 K and 20 T with the field parallel to the c-axis.
The company makes its tape by metal organic chemical vapour deposition (MOCVD) and describes itself as the only enterprise in China to have industrialised that route, where most producers use pulsed laser deposition (PLD). It is a subsidiary of the Jiangsu Etern group. Chinese tape capacity is expanding on several fronts at once, including Shanghai Superconductor’s Zhangjiang plant, and fusion is one of the key demand applications for that supply.