The governments of the Middle East should consider investments in nuclear fusion—not least because of its likely impact on hydrocarbons once introduced.
Electricity demand across the Middle East is rising rapidly as populations grow, cities expand, and energy intensive sectors such as desalination, cooling, digital infrastructure, and heavy industry scale up. Reliable electricity supply will increasingly shape the region’s economic growth and political stability. According to the International Energy Agency, power demand across the Middle East is expected to continue increasing significantly over the coming decades.
The Middle East’s Energy Constraints
Recent regional instability has exposed a structural weakness in the region’s energy model. Electricity demand is rising each year, yet much of the system still depends on fuels whose supply, price, and export routes remain exposed to geopolitical disruption. At the same time, structural drivers of demand including cooling, desalination, urban expansion, data centres, and industry are pushing electricity consumption even higher.
Burning hydrocarbons for domestic power reduces export capacity in economies that still depend on hydrocarbon revenue. Solar and wind contribute to decarbonisation, but they do not solve the region’s baseload electricity needs. They are intermittent, land intensive at scale, and require major storage or backup generation to support continuous loads such as desalination and heavy industry. Desalination itself requires a large and continuous electricity supply. The IEA notes that desalination already accounts for a significant share of Middle Eastern energy use and that its share is set to rise further.
Nuclear fission can provide baseload electricity, but it introduces other challenges. The UAE’s Barakah plant shows that fission can be deployed in the region. But this brings long-lived radioactive waste, complex fuel cycle questions, and proliferation sensitivities that remain politically difficult in the Middle East. That is the constraint the current crisis has exposed. The region therefore needs a power source that is dense, scalable, reliable, clean, and less exposed to geopolitical risk.
Nuclear Fusion as a Strategic Energy System
Fusion energy avoids many of the constraints that complicate current energy systems in the Middle East. Fusion produces energy by combining hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium and tritium rather than splitting heavy atoms as in nuclear fission. The reaction produces no carbon emissions during operation, generates minimal long-lived radioactive waste compared with fission, and does not create plutonium or other materials associated with nuclear weapons programs.
These characteristics address several of the region’s political and technical constraints. Fusion reactors do not require uranium enrichment infrastructure or fuel reprocessing, two areas that have historically created proliferation concerns in civil nuclear programs. At the same time, fusion provides the kind of dense baseload electricity normally associated with nuclear power while avoiding many of the waste and safety issues that accompany fission technology.
Fusion fuel is also abundant. Deuterium can be extracted from seawater, while lithium, used to breed tritium fuel inside reactors, is widely available around the world. The energy density of fusion reactions is extremely high compared with fossil fuels or renewables, allowing reactors to produce large quantities of electricity from relatively small amounts of fuel. For energy systems that must support desalination, heavy industry, and large urban populations, this combination of reliability, energy density, and fuel security is difficult to replicate with other technologies.
Nuclear Fusion Is on the Cusp of Introduction
Fusion energy is rapidly moving from laboratory research toward industrial development. More than 50 private companies are now developing fusion reactors worldwide and the sector has attracted more than $9.8 billion in private investment, according to the Fusion Industry Association. In the past year alone more than $2.6 billion in new capital has entered the sector as governments, venture capital funds, and technology investors accelerate development.
National programmes are also expanding to support commercialization. The United States has launched a national Fusion Energy Strategy aimed at accelerating private sector deployment, while the United Kingdom is pursuing a prototype fusion power plant through its STEP program. In Europe, new ventures such as Proxima Fusion are translating decades of scientific research into commercial reactor designs. The company recently secured support from the German state of Bavaria as part of a multibillion euro initiative to build a fusion demonstration facility and advance Europe’s first commercial stellarator power plant.
Private industry is increasingly driving the sector’s momentum. Companies such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Proxima Fusion are developing next generation reactor technologies while attracting investment from some of the most influential figures in global technology and finance. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has attracted backing from major global investors, including Bill Gates via his Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and strategic participation from Japan Investment Management Co. through the JIMCO Technology Fund. Both firms invested in the company’s $1.8 billion Series B financing round to accelerate the commercialization of fusion energy. Helion Energy, backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and secured an agreement to supply fusion electricity to Microsoft data centres later this decade.
How the Middle East Can Position Itself in the Global Fusion Industry
The number of actors shaping this industry remains relatively small. A handful of companies, investors, and governments are now defining the technologies, supply chains, and industrial ecosystems that will underpin future fusion power.
For the Middle East—a region that historically shaped global oil markets—the strategic opportunity is clear. Entering the fusion ecosystem now will allow regional states to participate in building the next global energy industry, rather than simply importing technologies developed elsewhere.
The practical question for Middle Eastern governments is how to engage with fusion while the sector is still forming. Participation does not require waiting for commercial reactors to arrive. Instead, states can begin by allocating capital through sovereign wealth funds into leading fusion companies, funding joint research partnerships with international laboratories and universities, and positioning regional industries within emerging supply chains for advanced materials, rare minerals, cooling systems, and precision manufacturing. At the policy level, regional governments can incorporate fusion into long-term energy and industrial strategies by supporting research centres, workforce development, and regulatory frameworks suited to future fusion facilities.
These steps will not be easy to take, and as time goes on, competition both within the region and outside it will increase. But the countries that take these steps now will be better positioned to attract pilot projects, build industrial capability, and participate in shaping the institutions and markets that will govern the technology in the decades to come.
About the Author: Abdus Saboor Shaik
Abdus Saboor Shaik is a researcher in nuclear fusion materials at Imperial College London and cofounder of Indimaj Group. His research focuses on atomistic modelling of irradiation effects in fusion steels for programmes linked to STEP and the UK’s wider fusion materials development efforts, alongside technical work on next-generation fusion systems with NEURONE. He actively engages investors, research institutions, supply chain companies and government stakeholders to support the development of fusion energy ecosystems in the Middle East.
