When you follow fusion news, your attention is naturally drawn to big words: “giant tokamak,” “superconducting coils,” and “trillion‑yen national projects.” But as I’ve been reading through the recent announcements about Sugino Machine, I’m reminded of a simple, often forgotten truth: in the end, what keeps ITER running is the ability to properly tighten, cut, and reconnect each individual bolt and pipe with absolute reliability.

Sugino Machine’s story with ITER did not suddenly appear in the mid‑2020s. Behind it lies decades of experience supplying “quietly critical” equipment for nuclear facilities and plants: pipe cutting and expansion tools, heat exchangers and boilers, and radiation‑resistant remote devices—equipment that may look unglamorous, but simply cannot be allowed to fail.
Because of that accumulated expertise, Sugino was approached via Japan’s National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST) to collaborate on developing remote maintenance tools for ITER. By 2024, the company was visiting the ITER Organization in France, inspecting the vessel walls and piping on site, and working together to define “what kind of maintenance tools are actually needed.”

In the latest news, we see QST, Sojitz Machinery, and Sugino Machine moving ahead with the manufacture of “initial assembly tools” for ITER’s blanket, as well as systems to bolt and fix the inner wall components.
Originally, ITER itself had planned to develop and procure these tools, but the technical difficulty and risk of failure were considered high. The fact that Japanese technology has been selected for this critical task means that “the know‑how of a mid‑sized Japanese machinery maker is now directly supporting the physical assembly of the world’s largest fusion reactor.” Symbolically, that’s a big deal.

What I find particularly interesting is that Sugino’s participation in ITER is not ending as a one‑off project. The company itself positions the know‑how gained from developing remote maintenance tools and initial assembly systems as a major advantage for future DEMO and commercial reactors both in Japan and abroad.
On top of that, Sugino has begun working on the assembly equipment for superconducting coils for Helical Fusion, a Japanese startup, which means a new pattern is beginning to emerge: “take the capabilities honed on ITER and connect them directly to the commercial reactor development efforts of Japan‑born startups.”​

Seen from an investor’s perspective, this carries an important implication. The fusion ecosystem does not consist solely of startups building reactors. It rests on a whole layer of companies doing “remote maintenance,” “assembly and disassembly,” “piping and heat exchange,” and “inspection and diagnostics”—the firms that take on the heavy, dirty, hazardous tasks and execute them with high precision.
Many of these companies are mid‑sized manufacturers rooted in regional economies. They rarely appear in flashy headlines about IPOs or massive funding rounds. But once they become deeply involved in a project like ITER, the experience they gain can be reused for fusion projects around the world for decades to come.

When we talk about “a sun on Earth,” we tend to focus on plasma and magnetic coils. In reality, though, nothing will run safely for even a single day without rigorous control of the torque used to tighten each bolt, tools that can reliably cut and reconnect coolant pipes, and remote devices that will not malfunction in a radiation environment.
Tracing the history of Sugino Machine’s involvement in ITER, I increasingly find myself thinking that Japan’s real strength in fusion may lie not only in cutting‑edge theory, but in the on‑the‑ground ability to “turn the last, most troublesome parts into reliable hardware.”

As a VC trying to step into the fusion space, the real challenge will be how many companies we can identify within Japanese manufacturing that could become “the next Sugino Machine.” That means carefully mapping mid‑sized firms already involved in ITER and domestic DEMO projects, and figuring out how to connect their technologies to startups and new business lines. For me, a key emerging theme is how capital can play a role in building a “sun on Earth” that starts from a single bolt.

This post draws on an article published in Nikkei on February 16, 2026.