Realta Fusion will build its headquarters and R&D facility at OM Station, the former Oscar Mayer plant in Madison, after Wisconsin and the city put together an incentive package worth up to $55 million.
Nearly all of that comes as tax relief. The package includes an estimated $37.5 million in state sales and use tax exemptions, up to $15 million in performance-based enterprise zone tax credits from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, and $2.8 million in tax increment financing from the City of Madison. Realta expects the site to eventually support more than 600 jobs.
The company plans to break ground on the facility, which it's calling The Realta Forge, before the end of the year. That's where it will build Hammir, its next-step magnetic mirror machine.
The decision ends a site search that ran nearly two years and considered locations in Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Tennessee. In the end, Realta stayed put. "We spent the better part of the past two years searching across the country to find the most favorable business environment and the most attractive site to build our R&D facility, and we found it in our own backyard," said CEO Kieran Furlong.
Wisconsin has been laying the groundwork for a while. In April, Governor Tony Evers signed Wisconsin Act 165, the first standalone state law in the country to exempt fusion capital spending from sales tax. The WEDC credits are the largest the state has ever offered a fusion company. Dominick Bindl, Realta's VP of technical development, who led the site selection, called it "the most impactful state-supported fusion deal ever done in the United States."
Realta spun out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is backed by Khosla Ventures and Future Ventures. It's an awardee of DOE's Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program and runs the WHAM experimental mirror machine at UW-Madison's Physical Sciences Laboratory.
