American Hardtech Weekly Roundup #11

In a surreal demo, Tesla unveiled its next-gen Roadster near Waco, Texas, using cold-gas thrusters built with SpaceX engineers to drive up an inverted ramp and flip. The new Roadster also jumped and did a barrel roll over the current Tesla lineup of cars & trucks. And, its live 0-60 demo was clocked at 0.81 seconds. Musk called it “the best of the last of the human-driven cars.” Production is scheduled for 2028.

GlobalFoundries will build and run two new chip fabs in Malta, New York, funded with up to $21B from Japan under the U.S.-Japan trade deal, and the Commerce Department gets roughly a 4% stake in GF. The first fab comes online in 2029, adding about 900k wafers a year.

AUSA turned into an interceptor showcase. The Army is weighing building 4k to 8k air-defense interceptors a year and invited new entrants into two missile competitions, as Lockheed advanced its PAC-3 Edge, Anduril unveiled its Steelfin family, and LA’s CHAOS Industries showed its low-cost VESPID drone killers.

Joe Gebbia’s National Design Studio launched American Forge, a six-month residency with AI coding company Cognition that recruits top engineers to rebuild federal services like benefits, financial aid, and Medicare enrollment.

Lockheed Martin is investing $300M in its Grand Prairie, Texas missile plant and bringing in Torrance’s Hadrian to run a 24-machine automated cell inside it. “This is the first time a defense prime has really partnered with a new, innovative manufacturing technology company,” said Hadrian CEO Chris Power.

Big checks kept flowing into hardware. IonQ raised $2B from a single investor, Bedrock Robotics is raising $600M for self-driving construction equipment, Portland’s Mueon raised a $65M Series A for stacked compute-and-memory chips, and San Francisco’s Origin raised $20M for drywall-finishing robots.

Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle told industry, “Everything we buy from here on out will have open architecture; it’s non-negotiable,” meaning vendors can’t wall off their systems’ data and interfaces. He also announced a “manufacturing rodeo” early next year to stress-test suppliers.

Autonomy had a big week across the military. The Army will test autonomous units in all five of its corps under a new Futures and Autonomous Systems Command, the Air Force is awarding contracts for a roughly $10M-per-plane Reaper successor, and Hegseth asked for about $50B to mass-produce autonomous systems.

Power for AI kept scaling up. Menlo Park’s Mainspring Energy signed a deal to supply AEP with up to 1.6 GW of its fuel-flexible linear generators, and Venture Global lined up GE Vernova and Baker Hughes for up to 16 gas-fired “power islands” of 720 MW each to run data centers off the grid.

Blue Origin plans more New Glenn launch pads in Florida and a $330M factory expansion to build up to 150 upper stages a year, while Long Beach’s Rocket Lab pushed Neutron’s first launch to 2027 after finding manufacturing issues in a first-stage tank dome.

The SBA and the Pentagon signed an agreement that lets the Pentagon take preferred-equity stakes in small and mid-size defense manufacturers, with SBA handling diligence and underwriting. Munitions, platforms, and critical minerals are among the targets.

Regulators pulled in opposite directions. The NRC renewed Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactor design through 2066 with Vogtle’s lessons built in, so future plants can skip re-reviews, while Interior asked a court to let it rescind approval of Revolution Wind, an offshore wind farm already sending power to the grid.

Nuclear startup Valar Atomics sued its own early investor, Day One Ventures, over Day One’s right to invest in Valar’s $1B Series B and future rounds.

TSMC posted record quarterly profit and sent teams to scout sites in Texas beyond its Arizona campus. It’s in talks on Musk’s Terafab project but says any fab it joins must be run by TSMC.

ASML posted record sales and warned that its planned supply of chipmaking machines won’t fully meet demand in 2027 or 2028, even as it adds about 30% more capacity.

Czech defense group CSG bought a 9.5% stake in MDA Space, becoming the Canadian space company’s largest shareholder, and the two plan to explore co-investing in European manufacturing and partnering on acquisitions.

Estonia’s Skeleton Technologies became a unicorn after Siemens invested more than $100M and won exclusive rights to sell its power storage to data centers. Skeleton plans to spend $200M+ expanding in the U.S., including factories.