I definitely buy that there's a market for small power plants that cost too much to be competitive on the grid (in some sense that's literally what generators already are), but I don't see how datacenters are in that market.
Are you kidding? If datacenters aren't the majority of that market, they will be soon, and their share will keep growing on the short term. Only factories match their consumption, every other wholesale energy buyer is relatively tiny.
But that market will pay at most a 3x to 5x markup on the grid price. There exists a smaller one formed by far from the grid activities that will pay a much higher price.
You do, unless you sign a contract with a large datacenter operator that's willing to pay above market price for the PR benefit/green energy credits of a working fusion reactor. Which presumably is the point of this.
There's no real reason fusion couldn't end up the same way.
It's the fate of most technologies to fail this way, so it shouldn't be surprising (or a source of dishonor) if the same thing happens to fusion. That doesn't mean money spent developing fusion is necessarily wasted; the size of the energy market -- a quadrillion dollars or so over the 21st century -- justifies longshot investments.
