In my experience, the amount of money invested reflects the collective belief that a given technology is going to succeed and be profitable. Investors will act

In my experience, the amount of money invested reflects the collective belief that a given technology is going to succeed and be profitable. Investors will act like fusion research is not worth investing in all the way until someone actually achieves self-sustaining fusion for the first time. Then, funding will rush in and investors will walk over each other like it's black Friday to throw their money at fusion startups, which will start popping up like mushrooms. It will be just like deep learning. There wasn't really much investment in neural network research and hardware until the field started having some big breakthroughs, at which point cash started flooding in and the community got extremely excited. I think we'll see fusion breakthroughs in the next decade or two, and it's going to be interesting.