Milena Roveda, Gauss Fusion, nuclear fusion and the role of Europe

Gauss Fusion was born in 2022 and has quickly become one of the European champions in the development of nuclear fusion. In this article we have drawn a portrait of the company and its CEO Milena Roveda who a few days ago announced that she had decided to leave the position on April 15, 2026.

“I joined Gauss Fusion with a very specific objective – she tells Startupbusiness – to take one of the most complex and promising technologies in the world, still confined to scientific research, and make it a credible industrial reality. This is exactly what we did. In three years we built a company from nothing, but above all we built the conditions for fusion to leave the laboratory and enter a real industrial trajectory. We put together an excellent team, combined scientific expertise and industrial capabilities, structured a European supply chain and built partnerships with the main players in the sector”.

The result that Roveda considers the most important of those obtained is the Conceptual Design Report: not a theoretical exercise, but the first complete conceptual project in Europe for a commercial fusion power plant. A work that defines architecture, systems, industrial logic and development path. A work that, above all, has been independently reviewed and validated by international experts. “We have transformed a scientific promise into a credible industrial platform. The CDR is the arrival point of this cycle and the starting point of the next one. For Gauss Fusion, and for me.”

Gauss Fusion now enters the engineering phase. “My role has always been that of the pioneer and the enabler: entering when something does not yet exist, building it, giving it structure, aligning the right actors, making it possible and bringing it to the point where it can stand on its own two feet. This work has a very specific nature: it is made of vision, but also of concrete construction, of difficult choices, of the ability to hold together different worlds, research, industry, capital, institutions, and transform them into a coherent project. And it is a job that, by definition, has a moment in which complete.”

Gauss Fusion has thus matured into a structured industrial program, with a validated engineering foundation and a clear trajectory towards implementation. The transition has happened. “What this experience has strengthened in me is a very clear conviction: there is an enormous space between what we know how to do on a scientific level and what we can achieve on an industrial level. And that is exactly where the game is being played. I don’t know in what form yet, but I know that I want to continue to stay within this challenge: in sectors with high potential where today’s choices will determine who will be competitive tomorrow. Working in contexts where the distance between scientific excellence and industrial reality is still significant and where someone must have the courage to bridge it. Building, enable, make possible”.

The results of Gauss Fusion

“When we founded Gauss Fusion in 2022, the basic choice was already clear: we didn’t want to do fusion research, we wanted to build Europe’s first commercial fusion power plant. A distinction that may seem subtle but is in fact substantial and guided every decision in the following three years.”

In three years Gauss Fusione has built something that did not exist: a concrete industrial project, developed with a team of 100 engineers from the best European companies in the sector, ASG Superconductors through Hofima and SIMIC for Italy, IDOM for Spain, Alsymex-Alcen for France, RI Research Instruments and Bruker EAS for Germany, and with top-level research institutes such as CERN, Max Planck Institute, ENEA, KIT.

The Conceptual Design Report was delivered to the German Government in October 2025: over a thousand pages that define for the first time, in an integrated way, how fusion can evolve from scientific research to industrial reality. Plant architecture, safety, materials management, costs, timing. The estimated investment for the first reactor is between 15 and 18 billion euros, with the aim of completing it by the mid-2040s.

In January 2026, an independent panel of senior European experts, chaired by Hartmut Zohm, professor of the Max Planck Institute, completed the review of that CDR, recognizing the solidity of the approach and the coherence of system engineering with future industrial implementation. It is the first and only fully structured European conceptual design for a commercial fusion power plant. The first European site mapping study was also completed with the Technical University of Munich: 900 sites in nine potentially suitable countries, of which 196 in Italy.

Today Gauss Fusion enters the engineering phase. The path from research to industry is real, it is documented, it is independently verified

The role of Europe

Europe has already lost solar, wind, semiconductors, batteries, electric vehicles. “Not for lack of talent, because the talent is there, the research is there, the engineering excellence is there. We generated the know-how, and then we let others build the industries. The problem has never been talent. It has always been the decision.”

Today we find ourselves caught between two powers that have chosen clearly and with continuity. The United States has an explicit, financed and transversally supported energy dominance strategy. China invests massively and coordinated by the state in every technology it deems strategic, with time horizons that we would struggle to even imagine. In the middle, a continent that continues to produce extraordinary science and patents, but which struggles to transform all this into sovereign industrial chains. And the same dynamic is repeating itself in artificial intelligence, in quantum computing, in quantum technologies, in every sector that will matter in the coming decades.

“The question I ask myself, and which I believe Europe must ask itself urgently, is not whether we have the capabilities. We have them. It is whether we have the will to stop operating in national silos and finally build real European industrial programs. Programs with adequate resources, clear governance, patient capital, integrated supply chains. Technological sovereignty is not proclaimed in press releases: it is built with coherent choices over time, between public policies, industrial investments and manufacturing capacity. In this scenario, Italy has a responsibility and an opportunity that still seem to me underestimated. I’m not talking about rhetoric, I’m talking about concrete, already existing skills. I see it with Gauss Fusion: ASG Superconductors is among the leaders in superconductivity. These are exactly the skills on which the fusion industry and more generally, the energy industry of the future will be based.”

The Italian-German axis, also reaffirmed in the meeting between Meloni and Merz, is not a diplomatic formula. It is a concrete industrial lever, which combines the manufacturing strength and technological vision of Germany with the supply chain excellence of Italy. “It is the type of structured cooperation, between key countries, with clear responsibilities and shared investments, which Europe needs to stop losing the battles that matter. I remain convinced that the greatest risk for Europe is that of not taking any risks and it would be a real shame because today it has in its hands the ability to lead the world towards the development of nuclear fusion which does not only mean the ability to produce clean energy capable of giving a concrete response, together with renewables, to the great issue that concerns us all and which every day we see becoming energy supply is increasingly complex, but also to create a real industrial supply chain with skills in various fields, with the involvement of companies from many different sectors, with the possibility of directing investments towards concrete projects”.