American Hardtech Weekly Roundup #8

Solcoa, a one-year-old Alameda startup, raised $75M in equity and debt led by Bain Capital Ventures to build a Nevada plant making 500 tonnes a year of rare-earth magnet metal, timed to the Pentagon's ban on Chinese magnets that starts in January.

Governor Abbott ordered Texas regulators to stop issuing any data center permits until ERCOT finishes auditing what those projects will do to the grid. Developers now have to disclose power draw, water use, and cooling approach, with a report back due October 19th.

Fervo brought Cape Station in Utah to first power, the first enhanced geothermal plant anywhere to reach the grid. The technique fractures hot, dry rock and circulates water through it, which frees geothermal from the few places with natural underground reservoirs.

Bechtel walked away from TerraPower's Natrium reactor in Wyoming after six years as its design and construction partner. TerraPower says the schedule holds and it will rebid the construction contract.

Crusoe cancelled its $1.25B order for 29 of Boom Supersonic's data center turbines, saying the deal isn't the right fit today. The same week, Denver's American Supercritical raised an $8M pre-seed led by defense investor Silent Ventures for units that bolt onto existing turbines and turn their waste heat into up to 50% more power.

Hanwha committed $2.2B to a munitions campus on leased Army land at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, making 155mm artillery propellant. It also leased 47 more acres at its Philadelphia shipyard, aiming to go from two ships a year to more than ten.

The Defense Innovation Unit opened a path for startups and their investors to get top-secret clearances, tied to countering drones at sea. Getting cleared is one of the biggest barriers for new defense companies, and applications close October 13th.

Two defense tech insiders said money isn't the problem. El Segundo investor Van Espahbodi warned the sector has drawn tourists paying "ridiculous valuations for companies that have yet to produce anything," and Seurat CEO James DeMuth wrote that "capacity that cannot produce a qualified part for two or three years is not yet military capacity. It is potential capacity."

Allen Control Systems, the Austin maker of the Bullfrog autonomous gun turret, is opening a Mountain View engineering office to hire 35 to 50 robotics engineers.

Two startups went after the same AI bottleneck, moving data between chips fast enough. PicoJool raised a $27.5M Series A for laser links that replace copper between GPUs, and DensityAI, founded by Tesla's former Dojo team, is reportedly valued at $10B for a chip that stacks memory directly on the processor.

A British uncrewed submarine fired an American Mk 48 heavyweight torpedo for the first time, off Scotland under the AUKUS technology track. MSubs built the Excalibur vehicle, and the effort went from approval to live fire in under seven months.

GE Vernova, Hitachi, Samsung C&T, and Poland's SGE signed a framework to deploy GE's BWRX-300 small reactor across Europe, 26 units in Poland and 14 across three UK sites. It's non-binding, and the first unit is already under construction in Canada.

Sweden's Refinyx came out of stealth after buying Northvolt's battery recycling technology out of its collapse.

Australia's HEO raised a $25M Series B to extend its satellite inspection network to geostationary orbit. It runs more than 50 cameras in space, some its own and some borrowed from partner constellations, to photograph other satellites up close.