Faraday Factory Japan Passes 5,000 km of Superconductor Tape Delivered to Fusion
Faraday Factory Japan has delivered a cumulative 5,000 km of high-temperature superconductor tape to the fusion industry, the company reported in September 2024. The figure is a marker of how quickly fusion has become the main customer for superconductor wire, and of how much more the industry still needs. Faraday put the tape’s total current-carrying capacity at one giga-ampere-metre.
The milestone measures both progress and the gap ahead
On 17 September 2024, Faraday Factory Japan announced that it had delivered more than 5,000 km of high-temperature superconductor (HTS) tape to fusion developers, which it described as one giga-ampere-metre of current-carrying capacity. The deliveries went to customers on four continents.
The same announcement set that number against the scale of what fusion will require. Building the multiple prototype machines the industry is planning will take on the order of 300,000 km of HTS tape. The 5,000 km delivered is early progress against a much larger demand curve, which is the pressure now driving tape makers to expand.
One supplier, four different fusion approaches
Faraday’s tape has gone into four distinct fusion concepts: the tokamak, the stellarator, the levitating dipole, and the magnetic mirror. Each confines plasma differently, but all of them rely on the same underlying material advantage: rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) tape carries very high currents in strong magnetic fields, which is what makes a compact, high-field magnet possible. Our materials guide explains why REBCO earned that role.
That a single supplier feeds four competing reactor designs shows how central the wire has become. The reactor concepts differ, but they draw on a shared and still-limited pool of tape production, sized in where the tape goes. The company would go on to sign further fusion supply deals into 2025.