In a historic first for the laboratory, CERN has received $1 billion in private donations to support the development of the Future Circular Collider (FCC).
This philanthropic backing marks a shift in CERN’s 72-year funding history as it seeks to bridge the gap for the project’s estimated $18 billion price tag.
It comes from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund, and billionaire entrepreneurs John Elkann and Xavier Niel. Together, they pledged a combined $1 billion in late December 2025 to jumpstart the project.
FCC is regarded as the “potential successor” of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
“It’s the first time in history that private donors wish to partner with CERN to build an extraordinary research instrument that will allow humanity to take major steps forward in our understanding of fundamental physics and the Universe,” said Fabiola Gianotti, CERN Director-General.
“I am profoundly grateful to them for their generosity, vision, and unwavering commitment to knowledge and exploration,” Gianotti added in an earlier press release on December 18, 2025.
Plans for FCC
The proposed FCC is expected to feature a massive 90.7 km (56.3 miles) tunnel buried 200 meters underground — nearly triple the size of the current Large Hadron Collider.
Pending a final decision by the CERN Council in 2028, construction of the initial electron-positron phase (FCC-ee) is slated to begin in 2030, with operations likely to launch in 2047.
This multi-decade endeavor aims to succeed the High Luminosity LHC, providing a specialized environment for high-precision particle studies until the early 2060s.
The FCC project follows a two-stage scientific roadmap.
First, the FCC-ee would serve as a Higgs factory, producing a million Higgs particles to analyze their properties with ten times the precision of the LHC.
Around 2073, this will be replaced by the FCC-hh, a high-energy “discovery machine” designed to smash protons at 85 TeV.
Reportedly, this second phase aims to hunt for entirely new particles through the end of the century.
China’s similar project stalled
The FCC’s momentum follows a major setback for its primary rival.
For years, China’s proposed Circular Electron–Positron Collider (CEPC) was seen as a direct rival that might beat Europe to the punch. However, Beijing recently declined to include the CEPC in its current government’s 2026–2030 five-year plan.
Beijing may reconsider it in 2030 if the FCC is not officially approved by then.
With China’s project on the back burner, CERN now has a clear lane to remain the world’s capital of physics
Moreover, a pause in China’s domestic collider project may open the door for a collaborative partnership modeled after ITER. Under this framework, China could contribute critical components and industrial expertise to the FCC.
New CERN Director-General Mark Thomson faces a dual challenge: navigating the diplomatic path for the FCC while overseeing a massive overhaul of the current lab infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Thomson’s immediate priority is the June 2026 shutdown of the LHC to begin the High Luminosity (HL-LHC) upgrade.
This ambitious project will replace nearly 90 percent of the accelerator’s focus systems with advanced niobium-tin (Nb3Sn) superconducting magnets. It would be capable of squeezing particle beams to a microscopic 10 microns in diameter by 2030, dramatically increasing collision rates.
