Modeling a Star in a Jar

Why the Real Breakthrough isn't just Efficiency, but the Power to Produce.

The dream of fusion energy has always been “30 years away”. But the bottleneck hasn’t just been physics; it’s been the “compile time” of reality.

Designing a fusion reactor requires simulating the chaotic dance of plasma turbulence in five dimensions. Historically, these simulations were so computationally expensive they took days or weeks to run on massive supercomputers.

Today, I’m incredibly proud to see Emmi AI - a company we at 3VC have the privilege to partner with - shattering that wall alongside the UK Atomic Energy Authority and JKU Linz. Their new AI tool, GyroSwin, delivers these simulations 1,000 times faster than traditional methods. The The Times has published a wonderful article on this.

The Contrarian View: It’s Not Just About Using Less Energy

Most people look at AI and see an “energy hog.” They obsess over making AI more energy-efficient, the “Efficiency Play.” But as I’ve argued before, the true driver of technological revolutions isn’t just saving energy, it’s maximizing “Output per Watt.”

The Industrial Revolution didn’t just save coal; it unlocked unprecedented mechanical power per unit of fuel. Today, Emmi AI and other industrial AI companies are doing the same for the most complex engineering challenge in human history.

Here is why this is a phase change:

• Beyond Efficiency: While most AI companies are fighting to use fewer watts for their models, Emmi is using AI to impact the “Produced Watts” side of the equation.

• The 1,000x Advantage: By reducing runtimes from days to seconds, they are enabling engineers to iterate through millions of designs that were previously “too expensive” to even imagine.

• Digital Bedrock: The winner in this race won’t just sell a software tool; they will become the trusted platform - the digital bedrock - upon which the future of clean energy is built.

Why this matters for the World

While I have talked about the AI “investment bubble” fueled by hype of course there is also always substance and defensible tech.

If we can model “a star in a jar” in seconds, we aren’t just looking at a faster computer; we are looking at the shortcut to a world of clean, cheap, and abundant energy.

Congratulations to the people and teams involved. You mark the beginning of a new kind of circular economy, one that is about turning intelligence into energy.