Helical Fusion's Stellarator Design Uses AI to Cut Parameters to Three

Helical Fusion CTO Wei Xishuo told the NFEC2026 AI-for-fusion forum that the company uses an autoencoder to compress hundreds of stellarator shape parameters into three. The company says this lets it predict zonal flow residuals and turbulent transport from more than 15,000 global simulations and generate new configurations with up to 100x better confinement in simulation.