American Hardtech Weekly Roundup #13

Shipbuilding had a big week. General Dynamics booked nearly $99B in orders in a single quarter, mostly for Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines, lifting its backlog to a record $220B. Hanwha Philly Shipyard won its first contract to build a Navy ship, and HII’s Ingalls yard signed production deals with robotic welding startups Path Robotics and GrayMatter Robotics to build faster.

Missile production kept ramping. Lockheed won a production order for the Air Force’s ARRW hypersonic missile and an Army deal to develop its next air and missile defense interceptor, L3Harris posted a record $53B backlog led by rocket motor contracts for THAAD and Patriot interceptors, and Dallas’s Firehawk raised $150M+ to scale its Oklahoma rocket motor plant.

Wall Street found new ways to fund AI chips. SpaceX lined up about $40B from an Apollo-managed fund to lease Nvidia’s next-gen chips for its data centers, and four big banks arranged $63B to buy Broadcom AI chips and lease them to Anthropic, with Broadcom guaranteeing part of the hardware’s resale value.

Big Tech’s AI spending kept climbing. Alphabet’s quarterly capital spending more than doubled to $51B as it began selling TPU chip systems to other companies, Microsoft’s roughly doubled to $39B, and Amazon spent about $77B and will sell its Trainium chips outside AWS from late 2027. Intel went the other way, falling 28% Friday as memory shortages squeeze PC sales.

Power equipment makers are booked out. Caterpillar posted a record $78B backlog as power generation sales jumped 30% on data center demand, GE Vernova agreed to buy German grid-parts maker Trench for $9B and said new turbine orders are priced about 50% higher, and Vertiv more than doubled its orders for data center power and cooling gear.

Defense tech deals stacked up. LA’s Nominal won a $71M STRATFI package, which matches government and private money, to manage test data for the Air Force’s drone wingman program. Salesforce agreed to buy defense logistics startup Rune Technologies, Anduril and Qualcomm unveiled BlueChip, a rugged laptop with about 90% U.S. or allied parts, and General Atomics revealed NextGen, a hybrid-electric armed flying-wing drone.

Big checks flowed to builders. Re:Build raised $2.1B led by General Catalyst and JPMorgan to scale its factories and launch new industrial startups, San Francisco’s Bedrock Robotics closed a $600M round for self-driving excavators, and Dallas’s Disruptive closed a $10B fund for late-stage AI and defense companies. “We’re trying to undo 40 years of deindustrialization,” said Re:Build CEO Miles Arnone.

Space had a busy week. The FCC approved Amazon’s $11.5B Globalstar purchase, setting up a direct-to-phone satellite challenge to SpaceX, and Stoke Space won a $150M Pentagon loan commitment for a second launch pad. Cowboy Space unveiled a rocket whose upper stage doubles as an orbital data center, and Google’s first prototype data center satellite came online with four of its TPU chips.

Nuclear permitting sped up. The NRC finished its safety review of X-energy’s Xe-100 plant at Dow’s Long Mott site in Texas, which would be the first grid-scale advanced reactor at a U.S. industrial facility, and finalized a rule capping most contested licensing hearings at about a year. DOE also offered Constellation up to $5B for upgrades that squeeze more power from existing reactors.

Energy deals got bigger. EQT agreed to buy Range Resources in an all-stock deal creating a $50B+ natural gas giant, AEP unveiled a $100B five-year plan for transmission and generation, DOE closed $5.1B in loans to Alliant Energy, and Walmart invested in Austin’s Base Power and will sell its home batteries in stores.

Robots got more orders and a policy signal. The White House found that reliance on imported robots and industrial machinery threatens national security but chose negotiations over tariffs for now, North American robot orders rose about 25% last quarter, Emeryville’s Foundry Robotics raised $100M for an AI-run factory that builds drones and satellites, and Kodiak signed its first binding driverless truck deal.

Heavy industry and materials moved forward. Nucor’s CEO said demand is the strongest in his 31 years at the steelmaker, Honeywell will build a $500M automated factory in Tempe, Arizona, Perpetua won up to $40M from the Army toward restarting U.S. tungsten mining, and American Advanced Materials raised $12.5M to make titanium sponge, which the U.S. hasn’t produced since 2020.

Korea’s memory makers are sold out. SK hynix said its DRAM and HBM, the high-bandwidth memory used in AI chips, is effectively sold out through 2029, and Samsung posted a record quarterly profit and expects its Taylor, Texas, chip fab to start operating in 2027. FuriosaAI also raised $620M to ramp production of its AI inference chip.

The UK moved to build more at home. It will require overseas firms winning big defense contracts to reinvest up to the full contract value in Britain starting in 2027, set a 2030 target for spending 3% of GDP on defense with up to £5B in new financing for defense companies, and agreed on a 10-year, £2.5B jet engine research program with Rolls-Royce.

Europe’s builders made moves. Germany’s Helsing unveiled Contra, an AI-run air defense system aiming for shots under $100k, Audi will build its first U.S. factory, a roughly $4B plant in Georgia, and Spain’s Abenójar Tungsten raised €170M in London’s largest mining IPO since 2018 to build a tungsten mine in central Spain.

Canada had a strong week. MDA Space won over $100M in initial work on antennas for 66 satellites in IRIS², the EU’s secure satellite-internet constellation, Calgary’s North Vector Dynamics raised US$20M to mass-produce low-cost counter-drone missiles, and Ottawa’s first national security strategy in over 20 years pledged a buy-Canadian policy.