George Mason’s Fuse tech hub opens to public

On the third floor of George Mason University’s new state-of-the-art Fuse tech hub, robots jumped, begged, rolled over and offered a mechanical paw to shake Friday while a small drone hovered above.

The endearing welcome by George Mason’s RobotiXX Lab robots offered a brief glimpse into the future for the group of academics and students who are developing the next generation of intelligent robots built to work on behalf of humans in challenging environments. When RobotiXX completes its move from its current home on the university’s Fairfax campus in May 2025, it will not only have a bigger, better space in which to build and demonstrate its robots, but it will also be settled among industry partners who can provide a lifeline as RobotiXX develops its technologies.

“We want to be connected with industry so that we can push these robots from our academic lab out there to the wild,” says Xuesu Xiao, RobotiXX Lab’s director and an assistant professor of computer science at George Mason.

Two years after its groundbreaking, Mason offered the first public look inside Fuse, the new, 345,000-square-foot high-tech building on its Mason Square campus in Arlington County’s Ballston-Rosslyn neighborhood, on Friday, announcing its commercial launch as industry partners begin to move into the space in coming months.

Classes at Fuse, which will include undergraduate and graduate-level students, are expected to begin in the fall 2025 semester. Research within Fuse is expected to begin by June 2025.

The building, a public-private partnership developed by McLean-based Edgemoor Infrastructure and Real Estate, which owns the building, will offer a mix of space for commercial businesses working in digital technologies, as well as high-tech lab, classroom, collaborative and incubator spaces and dining. The spaces are divvied up nearly into thirds, split among GMU, private businesses and collaborative and conferencing spaces, says Edgemoor Managing Director Brian Naumick.

Fuse cost a little more than $250 million to construct, with $90 million each contributed by Mason and Virginia’s Tech Talent Investment Program, as well as $78 million from Edgemoor.

Construction of Fuse is still ongoing, and commercial spaces will be outfitted as those tenants move in, says Liza Wilson Durant, George Mason associate provost for strategic initiatives and community engagement.

In October, Mason announced that the building’s first tenant, Cybastion, a cybersecurity and digital IT company focused on emerging markets, would move into Fuse in spring 2025.  About 75% of the commercial space has been committed, but officials declined to give a list of tenants or say how many companies are part of the initial slate, citing future announcements.

“Imagine how exciting it’s going to be for our students to come into the building in the fall and be able to walk past corridors with industry names where they’re going to want to work, and to have opportunities for internships and capstone projects, and even just shadow someone for the day,” Wilson Durant said during her keynote remarks Friday.

Fuse is opening as the region looks to become a tech stronghold and as GMU’s reputation as a research university grows nationally. Fuse is being viewed as a catalyst to spark more of that growth as well as an economic development driver for Arlington’s Ballston-Rosslyn sections, including as a source for building a greater tech worker pipeline.

Ryan Touhill, the county’s economic development director and a 2006 graduate of GMU, said in opening remarks that Arlington’s newest economic development strategy focuses on tech. “We’re going all in on the tech economy,” Touhill said.

Wilson Durant says several of Fuse’s new tenants are companies that have worked with the university as partners previously, adding that bringing academia and industry together into a collaborative space to work on a joint proposal on a project for a federal government agency, like the U.S. Department of Defense, might help accelerate the work.

“An academic environment, it fuels exchange of information and knowledge,” she says. “It’s less about selling a product and more about innovating and advancing the knowledge body. That’s a very attractive ecosystem for industry to be part of. It’s different.”