American Hardtech Weekly Roundup #12

SpaceX had a huge week. It swung to a $4.4B quarterly profit as its AI business took off, said it’s casting its own turbine blades to get power online faster for its data centers, and is reportedly in talks to lease 80k cell sites to become a fourth national carrier. Musk also pledged one of his SpaceX shares to every American kid next year.

Lockheed and the Pentagon agreed on a 10-year framework for 850 U.S. F-35s, pending multiyear authority from Congress.

Munitions makers kept scaling up. RTX said output of its critical munitions is up more than 90% from a year ago, L3Harris opened an Arkansas rocket motor plant built to double capacity, BAE signed a framework for up to 35k APKWS rocket-guidance kits a year, and Northrop said selling rocket motors to other primes will be its main growth driver.

Commerce will take minority, non-voting stakes in fusion companies Helion and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, plus Vertical Semiconductor and quartz maker Sibelco, in exchange for up to $389M in CHIPS R&D awards. Helion’s share would fund high-voltage power chips that it says no U.S. company makes today.

Power equipment makers raced to meet AI demand. Boom Supersonic opened a Colorado factory aiming to build 2 GW of data center turbines a year by 2029, Mitsubishi Power will more than double its Georgia turbine plant, Carrier is building a $600M chiller factory in Fort Worth, and Heron Power signed a 1 GW transformer deal with Vantage Data Centers.

Nuclear had a busy week. The NRC will let developers use data from DOE and Pentagon demonstration reactors in commercial license applications. AEP, Amazon, and X-energy will explore building 12 small reactors in Indiana, and Antares cleared DOE’s first approval for Mark-1, a microreactor that will make electricity in 2027.

Big checks kept flowing. JPMorgan says it has put $5B of its own equity into defense, energy, and manufacturing companies in a year, Jim Keller’s Tenstorrent raised $1.5B, ex-OpenAI research chief Bob McGrew’s Arda launched with $232M to automate factory instructions, and Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm’s Warhound raised a $200M seed to breed elite working dogs.

Korea’s HD Hyundai and construction giant Kiewit plan a new Gulf Coast shipyard to build Navy support ships, commercial vessels, and modules for other U.S. yards, with construction starting in 2027. It comes as a Euronaval report found China launched more than twice the U.S.’s warship tonnage in 2024 and 2025.

Tesla started producing Optimus humanoid robots in Fremont on a line designed for 1 million a year, though Musk says reaching that rate will take at least a year. It expects to deliver robots to outside companies around the end of 2027.

Heavy industry made big bets. U.S. Steel approved nearly $3B for a new hot strip mill near Pittsburgh, Phoenix Tailings will build a $375M rare earth separation plant in Rochester, New York, and USDA picked eight domestic fertilizer projects for about $573M in proposed funding.

The FAA certified Boeing’s 737 MAX 10 after years of delays, clearing deliveries of the 1,555 jets on order to start in the coming months. It’s the first airliner certified to the full extent of the safety reforms Congress passed after the earlier MAX crashes.

Ben and Felicia Horowitz gave $150M to Intermountain Health to build Nevada’s first standalone children’s hospital in Las Vegas, one of the largest gifts ever to a U.S. children’s hospital. The roughly $1B hospital is slated to open in 2030.

Sweden’s Saab tripled its quarterly orders, led by Gripen E fighters for Ukraine, a GlobalEye surveillance plane deal, and systems for German frigates, with sales up about 31%.

Germany’s Rheinmetall opened a gun barrel plant in Telford, England, going from an empty site to production in eight months, and won Romania’s Mangalia shipyard at auction with shipping giant MSC to build ships for Romania.

Japan’s Sumitomo Electric opened the UK’s first factory for HVDC subsea cables in Scotland, a £350M plant that will help ease a bottleneck in cables for grid upgrades.