Here's this week's hardtech roundup.
U.S. HARDTECH
- Sila landed a $1.4B Pentagon loan to scale silicon-carbon battery anodes at Moses Lake, Washington, going from about 2 GWh a year to five times that.(TechCrunch)
- Trump signed a proclamation putting tariffs of up to 100% on imported drones, hitting anything over 25 kg or carrying thermal imaging, with 25% on smaller drones and components. Allied countries get capped rates, 15% for the EU, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, 10% for the UK. Most of it takes effect September 3. (Commercial UAV News)
- Form Energy raised $750M led by T. Rowe Price to expand its iron-air battery plant in Weirton, West Virginia. It has more than 80 GWh under agreement, much of it from data centers, and sources about 80% of its materials domestically. (DataCenterDynamics)
- AEVEX is buying BlackSea Technologies for $650M. BlackSea builds unmanned surface and subsea vessels out of a 57k square foot Baltimore plant and can turn out about 40 boats a month. It should do around $150M in revenue this year. (AEVEX)
- Archer is acquiring three Boeing businesses in exchange for a 19.75% stake in Archer: Insitu, which builds ScanEagle, Wisk Aero for autonomous flight, and SkyGrid for air traffic management. (Manufacturing Dive)
- Four record quarters in one week. Rocket Lab hit $234M with backlog more than doubling to $2.36B. Firefly cleared $100M for the first time. Intuitive Machines quadrupled revenue and pushed backlog to $1.8B. X-energy tripled to $54.6M with $1.9B in the bank.
- Golden Dome opened a front door for industry at hub.goldendome.mil, where primes, startups, and VCs can pitch concepts straight to program decision makers and see live capability gaps. Twelve companies cleared the first gate on space-based interceptors. (War. gov)
- A presidential memo will let the Navy build the first two hulls of up to three ship classes overseas, provided foreign yards buy into U.S. facilities, and license their methods. It also orders planning for a fifth public shipyard near the Pacific Fleet. (USNI News)
- Heron Power is putting over $100M into a Morgan Hill, California factory and hiring 600 people to build 5 MW power conversion units, up to 10k a year by late 2027. Roughly 80% of U.S. grid components like transformers and inverters are imported today. (Power Technology)
- Amazon bought 8k acres in Pecos County, Texas for a data center campus running behind the meter on a 35-turbine, 7.65 GW gas plant plus storage and solar. If built as described it would be the largest gas plant in the country. (DataCenterDynamics)
ALLIED HARDTECH
- UK: Cambridge Aerospace raised $300M at a $3.4B valuation, 2.6x the mark it set in April. Founded in 2024, it builds Skyhammer, a low-cost interceptor aimed at Shahed-type drones. (Defence Industry Europe)
- South Korea: Hanwha bid about $1B for Austal USA and has four weeks to look at the books. The Mobile, Alabama yard builds submarine modules and Coast Guard cutters, so CFIUS will have a say. (USNI News)
- Japan: Japan and the U.S. are advancing a rare earth project in seabed mud about 6 km down near Minamitorishima, where the deposit is estimated at 16 million tons. A full-scale mining test is planned for early 2027. (Bloomberg)
- EU: Eutelsat committed €3.39B to lead IRIS2, which cleared design review and entered build. The constellation grew to 348 satellites and the budget to about €15.6B, with first launches in 2029 on a European rocket. (Defence Industry Europe)
That's the week!