{"slug": "new-superconducting-chip-aims-to-help-tame-fusion-plasma", "title": "New superconducting chip aims to help tame fusion plasma", "summary": "Brookhaven National Laboratory on Monday debuted a superconducting neuromorphic AI chip built with other U.S. Department of Energy facilities and AI hardware start-up Great Sky to monitor and help control fusion plasma in real time. The chip has not yet been wired to a working tokamak; instead the team replayed data recorded at the DIII-D tokamak in San Diego at its original rate of a million samples per second, and the chip kept up while running algorithms to flag anomalies and predict disruptions, results the team is still writing up for publication. Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory research scientist Michael Churchill, who worked on the project, said \"All of this is very demonstration-stage right now,\" and Columbia associate professor Carlos Paz-Soldan said he is \"personally more excited about the use of AI in the area of materials discovery.", "body_md": "Artificial intelligence has [crept](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-ai-is-speeding-up-scientific-research-but-not-lab-experiments/) into nearly every industry, and the companies building its [hardware](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-apple-and-openai-are-reportedly-betting-on-ai-hardware-in-2026/) keep hunting for harder domains to flex in. The latest area runs particularly hot: the plasma inside a fusion reactor.\n\nOn Monday Brookhaven National Laboratory debuted a [superconducting](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-controversy-sink-this-superconductivity-breakthrough/) chip designed to help monitor fusion plasma in real time. The lab developed it with other U.S. Department of Energy facilities and the AI hardware start-up [Great Sky](https://www.greatsky.ai/).\n\nBefore fusion powers anything, its machines must be able to control misbehaving plasma. The chip’s makers hope their hardware can operate [quickly enough](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/high-bandwidth-memory-is-a-bottleneck-for-ai-chips/) to keep pace with changes in the plasma and help control them.\n\n## On supporting science journalism\n\nIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by [subscribing](https://www.scientificamerican.com/getsciam/). By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.\n\nSuch chips are destined for tokamaks, the large, doughnut-shaped machines that use magnets to hold the fusion plasma in place and that sit at the heart of many proposed fusion power plants. The extremely hot plasma fuel inside is temperamental. When it acts unexpectedly, it can cause a disruption, a sudden collapse that sheds its energy and can harm the device. “Disruptions are something that are kind of existential for tokamaks,” says [Michael Churchill](https://www.pppl.gov/people/michael-churchill), a research scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who worked on the project. “If we can’t figure out how to control disruptions, then we won’t have an operating tokamak.”\n\nTrouble can come on fast, but analyzing the plasma live takes lots of data, and processing these can easily bog down typical computers. [Neuromorphic](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-ai-circuitry-that-mimics-human-brains-makes-models-smarter/) AI systems, which mimic the structure of the human brain to crunch huge amounts of data in parallel, could keep up. Great Sky builds its version out of superconducting circuits—a cousin of the [hardware](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-field-guide-to-quantum-computer-qubits/) used inside some quantum computers—which is meant to let the company run its specialized AI right on the chip at the speed the job demands.\n\nThe chip hasn’t been wired to a working tokamak yet. Instead the team replayed data recorded at the DIII-D tokamak in San Diego, Calif., at its original clip of a million samples per second, and the chip kept up while running algorithms meant to flag anomalies and predict disruptions. The AI model on the chip is much smaller than, say, today’s large language models, and the team is still writing up its results for publication. “All of this is very demonstration-stage right now,” Churchill admits.\n\nIt’s unclear whether this will make nuclear fusion more reliable and safe or remain a show of chip power. Tokamaks already run without chips like this one, and their control mechanisms can’t react to problems with the plasma as fast as the new chip is meant to detect them. “I’m personally more excited about the use of AI in the area of materials discovery,” says [Carlos Paz-Soldan](https://www.apam.columbia.edu/faculty-staff/directory/carlos-paz-soldan), an associate professor of applied physics at Columbia University.\n\n[Shinjae Yoo](https://www.bnl.gov/staff/sjyoo), who chairs Brookhaven’s AI department and led the project, isn’t pinning the chip’s future on fusion alone, either. He wants to test it out in places where a traditional data center [won’t fit](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-tests-plan-for-ai-data-centers-in-space-project-suncatcher/). “I see immediate benefit in edge computing because it’s operating at the gigahertz” speed, Yoo says. “It has a memory already integrated.”\n\nFirst, though, the team intends to build a successor chip with a neural network that will be 10 times larger. and it plans to debut that chip at Brookhaven early next year and install at DIII-D sometime after. It’s then that Great Sky’s hardware could finally face a fusion plasma with no hard drive in between.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/new-superconducting-chip-aims-to-help-tame-fusion-plasma", "canonical_source": "https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-superconducting-chip-aims-to-help-tame-fusion-plasma/", "published_at": "2026-10-29 04:38:31+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-29 05:11:57.400178+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-chips", "ai-infrastructure", "machine-learning"], "entities": ["Brookhaven National Laboratory", "Great Sky", "U.S. Department of Energy", "DIII-D tokamak", "Michael Churchill", "Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory", "Carlos Paz-Soldan", "Shinjae Yoo"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/new-superconducting-chip-aims-to-help-tame-fusion-plasma", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/new-superconducting-chip-aims-to-help-tame-fusion-plasma.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/new-superconducting-chip-aims-to-help-tame-fusion-plasma.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/new-superconducting-chip-aims-to-help-tame-fusion-plasma.jsonld"}}