Ever since the 1930s when scientists, namely Hans Bethe, discovered that nuclear fusion was possible, researchers strived to initiate and control fusion reactions to produce useful energy on Earth. The best example of a fusion reaction is in the middle of stars like the Sun where hydrogen atoms are fused together to make helium releasing a lot of energy that powers the heat and light of the star. On Earth, scientists need to heat and control plasma, an ionised state of matter similar to gas, to cause particles to fuse and release their energy. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to start fusion reactions on Earth, as they require conditions similar to the Sun, very high temperature and pressure, and scientists have been trying to find a solution for decades. In May 2019, a workshop detailing how fusion could be advanced using machine learning was held that was jointly supported by the Department of Energy Offices of Fusion Energy Science (FES) and Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR).

The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) has also used AI in their Fusion Recurrent Neural Network which aims to predict plasma disruptions ("a fast and anomalous loss of stability that can cause severe damage to plasma facing components"). The prediction system is led by William Tang, a professor in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton and a principal research physicist at PPPL) and is considered to be "the first machine learning disruption predictor capable of consistently outperforming, on all metrics that matter, a simple "locked-mode" based predictor." In Eurofusion's paper on their advanced disruption predictor, they explain what the locked-mode is and how it is used in prediction: "When macroscopic instabilities start locking to the wall, the amplitude of the signal used to detect them (called locked mode) grows during the slowing down of their rotation. Therefore, the locked mode amplitude is routinely used as precursor of disruptions caused by this locking of instabilities to the wall.". One company working towards making nuclear fusion commercial is TAE Technologies (formerly known as Tri-Alpha Energy) and its CEO Michl Binderbauer claims that "commercialisation is coming in the next five years".