2026-06-05 20:53:49
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 196th Weekly Dose of Optimism!
A new American nuclear reactor has gone critical. Dan and I are doing a Hyrox in a few hours. New York City is hot and buzzing. What a week for the optimists.
Let’s get to it.
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Big day for the U S of A, and for our friends at Antares.
Last night, Antares announced that its Mark-0 low power reactor was brought to criticality at Idaho National Lab with a self-sustaining fission reaction. In doing so, it became the first novel reactor design to undergo a fueled test in over 50 years.
“We are now the first reactor to meet the intent of President Trump’s May 2025 EO 14301,” CEO Jordan Bramble said, “which calls for three reactors to meet this milestone before America’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026.”
This is a massive milestone, and one that seemed implausible even a year ago. It’s also just the beginning - more reactors will go critical in the coming month, and Antares itself is moving from testing to producing electricity. Or as Jordan put it, “We’ve made neutrons. Next up: electrons.”
Two and a half years ago, Julia DeWahl and I started a podcast called Age of Miracles to try to understand why America no longer made this miracle technology, and what it might take to change that. We talked to most of the founders in the space, some of whom are racing to criticality alongside Antares. Turns out, Julia, the co-founder of Antares, was the one who pulled it off, alongside Jordan and the rest of the team. It is an incredible accomplishment to go from “Why aren’t we doing this?” to doing it - going critical - in under three years. I’m very proud of Julia for making it happen, and excited for the country now that we’re producing new nuclear in America again. 🇺🇸
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There are no approved treatments for alcohol-related liver disease. It kills 30,000 Americans a year, about 40% of the population has some degree of fatty liver, and nothing.
Until now. NewLimit, the epigenetic reprogramming company co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and computational biologist Jacob Kimmel, just closed a $435 million Series C led by Founders Fund with Thrive, Greenoaks, and others at a $3.1 billion valuation, more than triple what the company was worth a year ago. For good reason - NewLimit is going into human trials with the first-ever test of an age-reprogramming medicine in human subjects, starting in 2027 in Australia, after success in mice.
NewLimit fed old mice alcohol as their sole calorie source for 11 days and then gave them a binge dose. The untreated old mice flipped onto their backs and stayed sedated for 8 to 12 hours, like me if I have a couple drinks now. Young mice on the same protocol just popped up like it was nothing. But when old mice got a single dose of NewLimit’s therapy, RNA encoding specific transcription factors, delivered via lipid nanoparticles, they stopped passing out. They were as good as young.
As Kimmel told Ashlee Vance on Core Memory, “It is just binary. They’re either passed out or they’re not.” The therapy didn’t help them metabolize alcohol faster. It restored the liver cells’ intrinsic ability to withstand stress and regenerate, as if they were young again.
The discovery engine behind those transcription factor combos is an AI model called Ambrosia that ingests published gene-function literature, protein sequences, and DNA binding motifs, then trains on roughly 10,000 real lab experiments. It explains more than half the variation in results and can be run in reverse: you specify the cell state you want, and Ambrosia proposes the combination most likely to produce it. As frontier LLMs and protein-folding models improve, the embeddings Ambrosia feeds on get better for free.
NewLimit initially expected a decade-plus timeline to reach the clinic. They’re now five years ahead of schedule. The first indication will be steatotic liver disease delivered via a 20-minute IV infusion, with the long-term goal of a subcutaneous pen for broader GLP-1-like use.
Beyond the liver, they’re engineering nanoparticles to target blood vessel lining (with a focus on chronic kidney disease), T-cells (autoimmune conditions), and eventually the blood-brain barrier.
The sooner they get through their roadmap, the longer we all live.
Amrith Ramkumar for WSJ
AI for bio will be used for a lot of good. We need to prevent it from being used for bad.
The leaders of the big AI labs don’t agree on much these days. Over the past week, for example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that he doesn’t like Anthropic’s telling everyone they’re going to lose their jobs in one interview and that AI budgeting has become a huge issue for some companies, which would hurt both OpenAI and Anthropic but which I think he’s probably OK saying out loud because Anthropic is the one that just filed an S-1. “Sam Altman. You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he’d be the king.”
One thing they do agree on, though, is that people shouldn’t be able to use their products to make bioweapons. Sam, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis are among the signatories on a new letter urging Congress to pass laws that would require companies that sell synthetic DNA and RNA to screen their customers and block any combinations that could be dangerous.
Per the WSJ, “Trump previously revoked a Biden-era executive order that resulted in a gene synthesis screening framework. The White House last year said it would replace the Biden framework with its own screening guidelines but hasn’t yet published a replacement policy.”
Congress should probably go ahead and just do this. “AI is going to kill us all” is better left an Anthropic marketing tactic than a real scenario.
On Age of Miracles, one of the people Julia and I interviewed was Helion CEO David Kirtley. Coming in, we’d heard from people in fusion that Helion was brash, and more “Silicon Valley” than others. Its SpaceX-like cadence of building new generations while still testing older ones was aggressive.
We both came out of the interview incredibly impressed, and believing he might just pull it off.
This week, Helion got one step closer. It announced a $465 million Series G led by Thrive Capital (big week), bringing its total funding to $1.5 billion and valuing the company at $15.5 billion.
In February, its Polaris became the first privately developed fusion machine to demonstrate measurable deuterium-tritium fusion and hit plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius, or ten times the heat of the core of the sun. It’s also the first private fusion machine to operate with D-T fuel, after becoming the first company to receive regulatory approval to possess and use tritium for fusion energy production. Meanwhile, Orion, Helion’s 50-megawatt facility in Malaga, Washington and first commercial fusion power plant, is already under construction, with a contract to sell electricity to Microsoft starting in 2028.
Helion will use the money to scale manufacturing from Polaris, which proved the physics, to Orion, which is an actual power plant that aims to produce electricity that customers actually use using the same energy-generation process used by the sun.
It’s fusion, and it’s really hard, and there’s lots to prove, but the funding will help the company take a swing at the goal Kirtley laid our in our conversation: to make “generators per day rather than generators every few years” by 2030. Ab sole.
Frontiers in Neuroscience
An octogenarian Japanese-American woman with a 10-year history of Alzheimer's disease, including five years of near-total functional decline, monosyllabic speech, chronic urinary incontinence, flat affect, and dependence in virtually all daily activities, was given a single 5-gram dose of psilocybin mushrooms.
Nineteen hours later, after fits of intense sweating, she woke up and “the patient spontaneously initiated autobiographical conversation lasting several hours.” Over the following days and weeks, her urinary continence came back after five-plus years, and she began walking independently, dressing herself, sustaining eye contact, retrieving contextual memory contextual, and engaging emotionally.
A second session a month later produced spontaneous humor, vivid emotional imagery, and increased agility. She told her caregivers, unprompted: “It is pleasant to come here.”
This was a single case and not a clinical trial. The authors are careful to note that causality can’t be established, and the improvements were transient. Whether or not it was the mushrooms, what’s incredible is that, even after 5 years, her capacity for all of those things was still in there. As the researchers put it, “Residual functional capacity may persist in advanced Alzheimer's disease and may become transiently accessible under specific neuromodulatory conditions.”
My grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and me and my loved ones getting it is one of my biggest fears, so any good news about this terrible disease is welcome, and I want to believe. If taking some mushrooms helps fight Alzheimer’s, sign me up for the clinical trials.
EXTRA DOSES: No Science Breakthroughs this week (back next), but we have a lecture on the grid & batteries, MAFIA, Hoffman, and Resonant Computing below…
2026-06-02 23:34:10
Welcome to the 730 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 268,518 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Tuesday! Welcome to a Deep Dive I’ve been excited to write since The Electric Slide, about a company I invested in to build one layer of the Electric Stack - motors and actuators - in America.
If you’ve heard of Westmag, it might be because they make really great hats. Everyone loves the Westmag hats. I’m wearing one right now, which co-founder David Hansen gave me right off his head. This hat, I think, in a decade or two, will be a collector’s item.
I think that because over the past year, in stealth, Westmag has been making a lot more than hats. It’s been making motors and actuators, and it’s been making them to scale, so that in a decade or two, when we sit on the grass looking up at drone-decorated skies while robots do our chores, those drones and robots will be driven by Westmag motors and actuators.
Let’s get to it.
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If you drive out to South San Francisco, past and away from the city’s “Stop Hiring Humans” billboards and into the industrial part, you will find a low-slung facility from which David Hansen and Jordan Sanders plan to sling American-made motors and actuators to the American companies making drones, robots, and eventually, anything that moves under the power of electrons.
It is called Westmag, a portmanteau of Western and Magnetics, which pretty much sums up the mission. Electric motors are spinning magnets, and if America is to participate in the coming electric revolution, we are going to need to make them in the West.
This is the kind of statement you read on Twitter, at varying degrees of jingoism, as in “Get those Chinese motors out of my yard.” But it isn’t self-evident that we need Western motors, or, therefore, Westmag. The promise of globalization was cheaply-made Chinese motors powering expensively-designed American products for the benefit of all mankind.
Certainly, we want to design our own robots and drones. Intellectual Property is what America does best. We probably want to manufacture them here, or in a friendly country, too. Even if you don’t believe the China hawks’ predictions that there will be a hot Great Power Conflict within the decade, it is better to err on the side of not putting a heavy, software-controlled, and easily-bugged Chinese hunk of metal inside every American home, or, eventually, putting every American human inside a flying, software-controlled, and easily-bugged Chinese hunk of metal to fly through the sky.
But where do you draw the line?
Should you make every magnet that goes inside every motor in the USA? Should you mine the rare earths that make the magnets here, mine them elsewhere and refine them here, or import them? The rare earths are commodities, after all, and impossible to bug or remotely control with known technology. And even assuming that you want to make everything here, is there a company to be built doing so? Who in their right mind would want to compete with China’s massive scale and subsidy advantages?
American motors seem to violate both David Ricardo’s concept of Comparative Advantage and Michael Porter’s Five Forces. And yet, Westmag exists, and I invested in the company, alongside a16z, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, NFDG, Menlo Ventures, and my Electric Slide co-author, Sam D’Amico.
In that essay, I wrote, “I even just invested in a stealth company making electric motors.” Westmag is that company. We also shared the reason America wants a company like Westmag, and many similar ones in all areas of the Electric Stack, to exist in America:
Manufacturing and design are inextricably linked. When you make things, you learn how to make them better. You learn which parts of the underlying stack need to be improved, improve them, and make better products. This is a theme that comes up over and over again in our Electric Stack story.
In the Electric Era, maintaining design leadership without manufacturing leadership is not a coherent strategic position, and one that gets less coherent the better you believe AI will get.
Elon has solved this by building practically everything inside of his own companies. There is a parallel American ecosystem emerging to serve the growing number of electric companies not in the Elonverse. Westmag will be the winning motor company in this ecosystem, and will, in turn, enable its customers to win.
In a time of experimentation and innovation, like the one drones and robots are in today, if you place component manufacturing near product manufacturing, the whole machine spins faster. This is particularly true when, to say nothing of geopolitics and everything of commerce, American companies are producing at volumes at which they are not Chinese component suppliers’ top priority.
But that is half the story, a geopolitical imperative, not a corporate strategic one.
The other half of the story is why a specific company like Westmag should exist, and how it can generate persistent differential returns in a market in which practically zero-margin Chinese alternatives exist. While we will tell the whole thing, that’s the half we’ll focus on today.
It’s a story about Westmag specifically, and motors and actuators specifically, but it’s also the story of how to ride the Red, White, and Blue premium for just as long as you need to without counting on it long-term in order to kickstart demand and ride that growing volume down the cost/performance curve until, without subsidies and without patriotic premia, you can use scale and proximity and flexibility and speed to compete on overall system cost and win.
This, to be sure, is a scale game, and that’s not the type of game we’ve played well recently. As David said, “Motors are capped at 100% efficiency, so most improvements are incremental. So you can go from 89% to 91%, but it turns out that doesn’t matter at all if you don’t make it and get it adopted at scale.” Previous attempts to compete in motors were focused on those efficiency gains or theoretical breakthroughs at the expense of the ability to quickly reach meaningful adoption and scale, he continued:
Actually building a lot of it is the only way to get good at building it. China’s strength, which we are replicating, is building a lot of things and then improving it along the way. Bespoke low volume doesn’t create a manufacturing powerhouse with compounding advantages.
Westmag plans to build a manufacturing powerhouse by focusing on scale. As Jordan put it:
We are first focused on scale: scaling what works now and what is in demand now, while in parallel innovating on, and through scaling that, we will drive this virtuous feedback loop of innovations in how we manufacture and how we design motors, both for manufacturability but also for performance. You only get good at the stuff if you build a lot of it. And then you only win the market if you can actually get it out to the market in large numbers.
So this is a story about why and how to build electric motors in America for economic reasons, how to build them at scale, and how to win. And it’s a story about what it will mean for the rest of America’s electric ecosystem, alongside which Westmag is growing up, if it does.
It begins with what electric motors are, why they’re important, and where they’re made today.
In The Electric Slide, we used the electric motor as the vehicle for understanding the whole Electric Stack, because the motor is where everything comes together. The batteries supply power to the electromagnets that create rotating fields that pull the Neodymium magnets around and around, coordinated by the embedded compute that takes in data from sensors and tells the power electronics how to flip the current thousands of times per second to create the smooth rotation that turns electrical power into mechanical power.
Specifically, in a brushless DC motor, which power drones and the actuators inside humanoid robots, the stator, the part that holds still, is a ring of copper coils wound around teeth of laminated electrical steel, and the rotor, the part that spins, is studded with permanent neodymium magnets.
The controller fires the stator coils in a precise rotating sequence. Three phases switch on and off thousands of times per second, so that the magnetic field appears to whirl smoothly around the stator. The permanent magnets in the rotor chase that rotating field and never quite catch it, and that perpetual chase is what spins the shaft. As we wrote:
The magnetic force is doing the spinning. Everything else is about getting the magnets in the right place with the right polarity; nature does the rest.
An electric motor simply directs electromagnetic forces that want to move towards equilibrium.
The “brushless” part is an upgrade from older motors, which used carbon brushes to physically scrape current onto a rotating commutator, a mechanical hack that worked well enough but wore out, sparked, and capped achievable speeds. If you swap the brushes for electronics, you get a motor that is quieter, more efficient, more controllable, capable of tens of thousands of RPM, and good for a billion rotations before anything wears out. Which is why it has become the motor of choice for almost everything that needs to move precisely under software control, which is an increasingly large number of things.
If you want a deeper understanding of how electric motors work, check out our explainer, How Electric Motors Work, or watch this video:
For our purposes, what you need to know is that any electric product that moves is basically a bunch of actuators, of which motors are a subset, converting some form of energy into physical motion, wrapped in bodies that allow them to understand the world around them and move certain ways in response. The bill-of-materials (BOM) for a humanoid robot, for example, is roughly 50% actuators with motors and magnets at their core, which act as their joints.
“Motors are simple,” Jordan told me, someone to whom motors are not simple, when I visited the proto-motor factory. “They’re just magnets and copper wire wrapped around some electrical steel.”
From a materials perspective, motors are simple. Making motors, however, turning those materials into a precision component at scale, is much more complex.
A brushless DC motor is a bundle of compounding tolerance requirements. The electrical steel arrives as thin sheets that have to be stamped into laminations, coated to prevent eddy currents, and stacked into a stator with the layers aligned to within a hair. Copper wire, sometimes thinner than a human hair itself, has to be wound around the stator teeth at a precise tension, in a precise pattern, with as much copper crammed into the available slot area as physically possible.
Then there are the magnets. Neodymium magnets get pressed into the rotor at orientations specified to a fraction of a degree, and magnetized in place by fixtures that fire enormous bursts of current through coils to align the magnetic domains. Increasingly, you can get blocks of neo magnets in the US, but what you get is a slab of metal that isn’t yet magnetized or cut to the right shape. To turn block into a usable motor magnet you have to cut it (small-motor magnets are curved, and the curve is not easy), shape it, coat it, and magnetize it. No one does this in America today, so if you want to do it right and quick (i.e. if you don’t want to send the American magnet block to China or Malaysia and back), you probably need to do it yourself. If you get the orientation slightly wrong, your field ends up lumpy. If your field is lumpy, your motor cogs, vibrates, and wastes energy.
Stack those tolerances on top of each other (lamination, winding, magnet orientation, rotor balance, bearing fit, etc…) and you start to see why motor manufacturing is mostly a process problem, not a materials problem. The materials are simple. The process is annoyingly precise.
That is why, as much as their total dominance of the rare earth magnet supply chain or (no longer) cheap labor, China is so good at this. Over the past thirty years, they have made a lot of motors, and in the process, they have written a library of institutional knowledge. The winding machines in Shenzhen have been refined by a thousand small revisions. Chinese line workers know what a properly-wound stator feels like in their hands. Their test rigs have been calibrated against millions of motors.
This knowledge compounds for you, just like the tolerances compound against you, and it’s only if the knowledge wins that you can produce a lot of motors, cheaply and reliably. For the past three decades, China has been doing all of the compounding.
Like every layer of the Electric Stack, electric motors were invented in the West and Japan. Michael Faraday of cage fame built the proto-motor in London in 1821. A decade later, in Princeton, Joseph Henry discovered that you could make incredibly powerful electromagnets by wrapping insulated wire around iron cores.
Forty years later, in 1871, Zénobe Gramme built the first commercially successful generator, using electromagnets for the field magnets, powered by some of the current it generated itself in a process called self-excitation. In the 1950s and 1960s, American researchers began replacing mechanical commutators with electronic switching, and in the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese firms like Yaskawa, Panasonic, Sony, and later Mabuchi aggressively productized compact permanent‑magnet motors as transistors and then MOSFETs got cheaper. These were the first truly mass‑manufactured, consumer‑scale BLDC motors.
In 1983, in a story that you need to read if you haven’t, Sumitomo’s Masato Sagawa (Japan) and GM’s John Croat (US) independently discover Nd₂Fe₁₄B, the modern neo magnet, and presented their findings at the same conference in Pittsburgh.
Sumitomo perfected sintered high‑performance blocks, while GM’s Magnequench division perfects bonded molded magnets, both of which were used in neodymium magnets’ alpha product: 3.5” hard-disk drives (HDD), which relied on two small electric motors, voice coil motors and spindle motors.
As 3.5” HDDs overtook 5.25” HDDs, neo magnets swept the market.
And as neo magnets scaled, they and the motors they powered got cheaper, unlocking new use cases, more scale, better price-for-performance, and therefore more use cases, and more scale, in a virtuous cycle that we are still riding today. You can read the full story in The Electric Slide.
Today, however, the products that run on electric motors don’t run on American-made electric motors or neo magnets.
In 1995, GM, under financial pressure, sold 80% of Magnequench for $70M to a “US‑led” consortium that was, in reality, two PRC‑controlled companies led by Deng Xiaoping’s sons‑in‑law. CFIUS approved the deal on the condition of a 5‑year pledge to keep production in the US. Long before the five-year pledge expired, Magnequench’s Chinese owners had already cloned the Indiana lines in Tianjin. By 2003, the US plant shut down.
In parallel, as part of Xiaoping’s long-term plan, China came to dominate rare earth mining and manufacturing, including the mining and manufacturing of neodymium. By the early 2000s, having undercut them on price and environmental standards, China forced the US’ only big rare earth mine, Mountain Pass, into bankruptcy, and came to control the full rare‑earth → NdFeB magnet chain that is essential for high-performance BLDC rotors.
But supply without demand does not an industrial superpower make. Enter Shenzhen.
Shenzhen was a small fishing village of about 30,000 people across the border from Hong Kong before Xiaoping, as part of his “reform and opening” policy, designated it the opening country’s first Special Economic Zone in May 1980.
Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, China’s quasi-capitalist city exploded. Cheap labor poured in from across China to fill the demand for hands: Shenzhen had quickly become a hub for assembly and low-end manufacturing. Soon, dozens of contract manufacturers were making toys, watches, and all manner of cheap electronic devices.
BYD started in Shenzhen, to execute an arbitrage: reverse engineer Japanese battery manufacturing processes and replace all of the expensive automation with Shenzhen’s cheap, abundant labor. Over time, Wang Chuanfu’s company built out Shenzhen’s battery supply chain while becoming the world leader in electric vehicles, one feeding the other. If you make the components, you can make better products.
Johnson Electric, founded in Hong Kong in 1959 by Wang Seng Liang and his wife, set out to manufacture miniature DC motors specifically for the booming Hong Kong toy industry. When Xiaoping opened the Pearl River Delta to ~capitalism, Johnson moved production across the border, like many of Hong Kong’s electronics companies. By the 1990s, more than 80% of Hong Kong’s factories had moved to the mainland, mostly into the Pearl River Delta. Per the (surprisingly shitty) Porter’s Five Forces website entry for Johnson Electric, “the 1980s show a shift toward application‑specific motion solutions as automation and automotive electrification rose.” By the 1990s and early 2000s, “Johnson Electric established mainland China production and verticalized stamping, molding, and magnetics to protect margins; it diversified from brushed motors into BLDC, stepper, linear actuators and subassemblies.”
Thanks in part to the competence that Johnson Electric had built in motor manufacturing, Shenzhen became the epicenter of the RC hobby industry, which refined brushless motors specifically. The next big thing will start out looking like a toy.
So by the time that Frank Wang used the proceeds from selling flight-control parts to universities and Chinese power companies to move to Shenzhen and start Da-Jiang Innovations, or DJI, the city was already the place where almost every component a flying camera needs was already being made within a couple hours’ drive of his apartment, by people who had been making them for years. RC hobbyists were refining the brushless motors, and the speed controllers to drive them. BYD had already been making lithium cells and packs for a decade. Camera modules were widely available hand-me-downs from the smartphone industry that had turned Shenzhen into the best place on Earth to turn a bare Sony sensor into a working, calibrated eye for a few dollars. Gimbals, plastics, PCBs, radios, and GPS units were available on a quick stroll through Huaqiangbei, the city’s electronics district, where Wang could pull from some 30 billion components crammed into a single square mile, get a custom PCB turned around in 90 minutes, and go from sketch to prototype in a few days.
Cheap labor had attracted BYD, Johnson Electric, and countless other manufacturers to Shenzhen, but it was the components and expertise they’d built with that labor that made the city an ideal place to start a drone company in 2006.
But precisely because components were so widely available, a hundred copycats could pull them off the same shelves. So DJI started vertically integrating. It built the flight controller first, because that was the part Wang understood best, and the cost fell from several thousand dollars in the mid-2000s to a few hundred by 2012. Then they developed the gimbal in-house and shrunk until it cost a tenth of the professional rig it replaced. Then the camera. Then, eventually, the propulsion system itself, the motor and ESC and propeller, designed as a single matched unit.
Today, DJI makes something like 70-80% of the drones in the world, and it is, by itself, supplying itself, the largest drone motor manufacturer in the world by a wide margin. It got so good at making motors that it’s even started selling its Avinox e-bike motors to other companies.
Thanks in large part to DJI, but also to the ecosystem it grew up in and Xiaoping’s foresight, to the fact that someone buying a motor can also buy a battery and power electronics and custom-made PCBs right next door, China absolutely dominates the world’s production of drone motors.
That same expertise allows them to dominate the world’s production of robot actuators, each of which has a drone motor at its core.
Which means, along with all of those batteries and power electronics and custom-made PCBs, that China absolutely dominates the world’s production of drones and robots.
Because if you want to build products on the Electric Stack, it is critical to have fast-turn components available nearby.
On its face, it is not bad that China dominates drone motor and actuator production. In a frictionless utopia, it would be great.
A company in one country (say, America) would design a drone or a robot or anything that moves, they would send the specs for the components they need to a bunch of other countries (like, for example, China) where they could be made best-for-the-cost, those countries would make the components and ship them near-instantly back to the buyer, the buyer would assemble those components into a finished drone or robot or whatever, and it would sell them to customers around the world, each of whom would benefit from a product made in the most efficient way possible.
Sure, America could design and manufacture here, and there was a time in the 1970s when we were better at both designing and manufacturing than China, but if we’re better at designing than manufacturing, and if design captures more of the value, we can design here and manufacture in China, which has a comparative advantage in manufacturing.
Comparative advantage is a concept coined by the economist David Ricardo in 1817 to explain why countries engage in international trade even when one country’s workers are more efficient at producing every single good than workers in other countries. When Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson was challenged to “name me one proposition in all of the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial” by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, he thought for a few years and came back with comparative advantage: “That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that it is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.”
This is the logic that policymakers and economists used to justify globalization and the World Trade Organization, and it fueled China’s rise.
From the reform era through WTO accession in 2001 and into the 2000s, China was labor-abundant and capital-and-skill-scarce, so it specialized in labor-intensive assembly while the US specialized in the capital-, IP-, and skill-intensive ends. For a while there, it worked as planned. Americans were smiling all the way to the bank.
The Smiling Curve depicts how “value added varies across the different stages of bringing a product on to the market in an IT-related manufacturing industry,” and therefore, where value is captured.
This was the dream. China would sit low in the middle while America captured value on both sides. The iPhone is a canonical example. Kraemer, Linden, and Dedrick’s 2010 teardown found that Apple captured 58.5% of the value of the iPhone 4/3G in profits, while China’s labor earned just 1.8% of the value.
But China, as we’ve seen, didn’t plan to stay on the bottom lip, and it didn’t, because doing the assembly taught it the adjacent capabilities. Assembling electronics pulled it into making components, then the tooling and machines that make components, then design itself. Serving as the world’s factory was a thirty-year education that pulled China up the smile curve and across the product space into denser, more complex nodes. Over time, the country’s edge became capability instead of labor cost.
Today, in a specific set of sectors, China holds an absolute advantage, with the lowest cost and highest capability and most complete stack, all at once, such that capital and capability rationally flow toward China rather than away. The advantage rests on scale economies (largest volume → furthest down the learning curve → lowest unit cost), agglomeration (the Shenzhen/Pearl River cluster where all of the inputs, tools, and skill sit within a short radius), accumulated process knowledge, and vertical integration.
This is the situation we described in The Electric Slide. China doesn’t hold an advantage in everything, but it certainly does hold the advantage in the Electric Stack.
“Today, China produces 75% of lithium-ion batteries globally and manufactures 90% of the neodymium magnets that make motors spin. In power electronics and embedded compute, it’s rapidly gaining ground.” As a result, the world’s leading drone company (DJI), electric vehicle company (BYD), and humanoid robotics (Unitree, although the market is still very small) are all Chinese. As the WSJ reported, even Tesla is turning to China for Optimus’ actuators.
Read statically, at a moment in time in the late 20th Century, comparative advantage correctly identified assembly as the low-margin thing for America to offload. Read dynamically, however, low-margin assembly was the tuition that China paid to climb up the value ladder into absolute advantage over America in a category that I believe will define the future.
Again, there is a way to read all of this as “China Bad,” which isn’t particularly interesting. Certainly, if China is currently America’s greatest adversary and largest geopolitical threat, it is not ideal that they produce the magnets, motors, and batteries on which our drones, future humanoid soldiers, and all manner of electric vehicles run. It is in America’s defense interest to incentivize the production and consumption of American components by American companies, and it is doing that, as we will discuss.
But America’s goal should not simply be to survive militarily, but to thrive economically through the Electric Era, when almost everything we combust fuel to power today, and many things that aren’t currently possible, will need to be rebuilt on the Electric Stack.
And to do that, we will need to manufacture key components here, right next to the companies that make the products that use them because maintaining design leadership without manufacturing leadership is not a coherent strategic position.
In 2010, former Intel CEO and Silicon Valley legend Andy Grove wrote an editorial for Bloomberg Businessweek titled How to Make an American Job.
In it, he argued that it was unsustainable for Silicon Valley to pay a small number of Americans increasingly high compensation while hollowing out manufacturing jobs, and correctly predicted that China’s lithium-ion battery dominance would lead to EV dominance.
There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas.
What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.
That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to supply batteries for the more demanding PC laptop market, and then after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies did not participate in the first phase and consequently were not in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.
Grove disagrees with the then-(and maybe still-) popular idea “that as long as ‘knowledge work’ stays in the U.S., it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs… Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today’s ‘commodity’ manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.”
Sixteen years on, it’s safe to say that Andy Grove was right.
“Without scaling, we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies,” he wrote, long before LLMs — so put away your Pangrams. “Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.”
What I like about Grove’s analysis, apart from his predictions proving correct, is that it was written at a time when more Americans viewed China’s ascendency as a positive than a negative.
It rests on economic and industrial rather than geopolitical logic; it is offensive, not defensive. And he is arguing that to innovate in America, you need to manufacture the key components here, too.
To make great American drones and robots, for example, you need to manufacture motors and actuators in America, too.
The next question is: given the intense competition, is there a way to build a profitable drone motor and actuator company in America?
It is de rigueur to care about drone motors, and to want to make them in America, but David Hansen has been obsessed with motors and the Chinese manufacture thereof for longer than some would-be motor mavens have been alive, and he has the tweets to prove it.
An archaeological dig through his account finds that he began reply-guying to tweets on IEEE electric motor-related articles in November 2018 with his own YouTube rabbit hole discoveries on BLDCs.
That’s the same year that David went to China for the first time, to walk Huaqiangbei for himself and begin sourcing for the self-balancing, AI-copiloted e-bike company he would cofound in Seattle in 2018, Weel.
Weel custom designed and built its motors and actuators by hand, due to the fact that there wasn’t yet an off-the-shelf Chinese actuator that worked for their needs. Most small component suppliers didn’t even have English-language websites; it just wasn’t worth it, they had all the demand they could get from customers who spoke Mandarin.
But something you learn about David is that he wants to get to the center of things, to speak to the suppliers’ suppliers’ suppliers directly, to see what he can buy from as close to the source as possible, and to learn how the source does what it does. Despite his best efforts, he was basically stonewalled, until COVID-19 happened and the world shut down.
All of a sudden, there wasn’t too much demand to waste time talking to the persistent American with the small orders anymore, and there was plenty of time to waste:
I learned the Chinese supply chain in 2020 and 2021. When China shut down for COVID, the suppliers were all stuck at home, downloaded WhatsApp, and started replying more to Western companies. Over 2020 you suddenly saw them building English websites — small suppliers with a dozen people who’d never have bothered before, since they already had the channels. A lot of factories went direct that year, just as a means of survival.
So 2020 and 2021 is when I started buying a lot of stuff direct from China: magnets, stators, other parts you couldn’t buy from the factory as easily before. Everybody’s stuck at home in both countries, talking over the internet and buying stuff.
A quick Twitter search verifies the timing, because around 2020 is when David, aka @boxcardavid, started becoming the motor guy on Twitter.
(Lore: David’s handle is @boxcardavid because he lived in this train car for most of his 20’s. If you’re trying to make motors or actuators, this is who you’re competing with.)
You could tell the man liked motors back in the COVID times, but he really let his motorhead flag fly starting in 2024, when he started figuring out what to do after Weel. Teardowns, comparisons, technical debates, knockoffs, factories. If you were one of the small handful of Americans who cared about brushless motors before they were cool, you probably followed David.
That same search for the next thing took David on a tour of the American companies whose products relied on motors and actuators. “David was the motor guy on Twitter, traveling around everywhere,” Jordan said. “Everyone said it was a clear problem. A lot of folks wanted to hire him as Head of Hardware or Head of Motors to solve it, but it was unclear what that role would mean. There was a desire, but not necessarily the urgency to reduce their reliance on Chinese suppliers.”
Chinese motors were just too cheap and too high quality, and besides, it didn’t make much sense for any given company, each of which had low volumes and other things to worry about, to spin up their own in-house motor and actuator assembly lines.
From all of these conversations, David was starting to realize that someone might have to build the American brushless motor company. His plan then, in November 2024, was to try to push someone else to do it.
Then our friend Sam D’Amico told him, “do it,” and David said, “k,” and two days later, Western Magnetics Company, a C Corporation named by Sam in a DM, was incorporated.
The company that may represent the West’s best hope to compete in drones and robotics began the way that most great companies begin: with an “lol”.
Incorporation docs are not a company, however, and David kept traveling, trying to figure out what everyone who needed motors and actuators was doing to get them. In early 2025, his odyssey took him to Georgia to see Jordan, who had been an early investor and advisor to Weel and was now Chief Commercial Officer at Slip Robotics, a company that builds robots that load and unload trucks.
“Everyone has motor supply and performance issues,” Jordan told me. “Having worked in robotics for a decade, I’d seen and been part of companies that thought about producing their own motors in-house. Then you look into it and realize, oh man, it’s actually pretty expensive and hard. It just didn’t make sense for one company to do it in-house just to fill their own demand.”
But, David and Jordan put their brains together and thought, it might make sense for one company to aggregate demand and build all of the motors and actuators for the rest of them as a vertically integrated horizontal play. To do all of the things that you’d have to do to get really good at making high-quality motors and actuators, like going as far as needed upstream into the supply chain and building automation and, most importantly, getting to scale to drive all sorts of efficiencies.
“Any competent engineer with focus can build a prototype actuator or a motor,” David told me. “You can build a bad motor really easily, and an okay motor without much practice and using open-sourced designs. Same with actuators. The design has literally been open-sourced since 2018, thanks to the great Ben Katz, who I really want to work with one day.” (Ben, if you’re reading this, go work with David and Jordan.)
“How to do it is known: you can order stuff from China, hand assemble it, and make it happen pretty easily,” he went on. “But doing it at scale is almost unrelated.” So scale is what they’d do.
David and Jordan teamed up to found Westmag, a company that was born to scale by growing up alongside the nascent American drone and robot industries, aggregating their demand, and providing them with the motors and actuators they’d need to make their products move, with the consistency, responsiveness, and respect that those companies were simply too small to get from their Chinese suppliers, on tight timelines, and eventually, with scale, at a similar price.
Their timing couldn’t have been better, although they didn’t know it at the time.
Soon after they decided to start Westmag, before they’d made a single hat, let alone a motor, the US Government would sanction T-Motor, China’s largest drone motor supplier, sending drone companies scrambling for a Western second source, and a little later, robotics would become the topic du jour in San Francisco and in the White House, which had no interest in letting China get another 10+ year head start in one of the future’s most important industries.
None of that was part of the plan. That part was just pure luck.
“What’s that phrase?” David searched his brain. “You can’t count on luck, but luck counts, and I definitely count on it. It’s turned out great. Good to be lucky.”
It’s not that Westmag wouldn’t have worked without the new government-mandated necessity of its products, it’s just David and Jordan expected it to take a lot longer. “Our bet was that this stuff would happen in five to ten years,” David said, “but the wind shifted last year, in the middle of us doing all this, with the government, regulators, and customers.”
And truly, I don’t want to leave you hanging here, and the stories about this stuff are some of the best inside baseball in the piece, including T-Motor’s hasty launch of a sub-brand “Lig Power” (as in, we strongly suspect, Ligma, which, if so, nice work, China…) to get around sanctions, and I promise that I will tell them to you, and that they make Westmag’s position in the market stronger than it would have been otherwise at this point, but the whole point of this essay is that Westmag is not a geopolitical bet, that it stands on its own industrial and economic logic, and that, sanctions or no, Great Power Competition or no, Westmag’s strategy is a smart and well-supported one that will require a Herculean grind to pull off but is certainly possible to pull off, and if it does, answers the question “is there a way to build a profitable drone motor and actuator company in America?” in the affirmative, so we have to pause the storytelling for a moment here, in early 2025, before Westmag knew that it would become more necessary, sooner than it expected, to unpack the strategy.
When I wrote the Vertical Integrator series, I had a whole section that I ended up cutting on Porter’s Five Forces and why I don’t normally like the position of doing something really hard in order to earn the right to sell components into a handful of large, powerful, and slow-moving incumbents. Maybe, if there are only a couple of key buyers, they’ll hammer you on price and force you to build to spec. Almost certainly, they’ll move on a procurement timeline so slow it will bleed you dry.
Plus, given where we are, at the dawn of a new techno-economic paradigm, in what Carlota Perez calls an Installation Period, book says vertically integrate: “the Installation Period favors Vertical Integrators and the Deployment Period favors modularized suppliers.” If you’ve created a magical new technology, use it as the core of a new system that competes directly with them. In Power in the Age of Intelligence, I summarized my thinking in a question:
If your technology is so good, why aren’t you using it to compete?
Which is to say, in a very simple reading of the situation, Westmag is not the kind of company I’ve been looking to back.
But the fun thing about all of this, and why I find business strategy so endlessly fascinating, is that there are exceptions to every rule, and understanding where to apply the rule or where to grant an exception requires a deep dive into the specific details of the case at hand.
Take Westmag’s key thesis at the beginning, which Jordan described as: “at this moment, maybe these industries are taking off enough that you can actually aggregate this demand and jump to scale.”
There are no large, powerful American incumbents in drones or humanoid robotics. There is a fragmented market of younger companies that are too small to have much buyer power. Each, as Jordan realized, is too small or stretched too thin to spin up meaningful motor or actuator manufacturing themselves, which means there’s an opportunity. It also means that the normal pitfalls of trying to sell to large, powerful incumbents don’t apply: startups can move fast, and for now, no individual company has enough power (or alternatives) to exert pricing power.
The “for now” part is important, because the plan requires that some of the companies Westmag serves get very big. The key is, Westmag will ride to scale alongside them, and aggregate demand among many of them, so that by the time any drone or robot company gets really big, Westmag will have achieved a scale that none of them can match alone.
Scale, they realized early, is everything in this game, and getting to scale first means that Westmag will be able to do all of the hard things required to actually do this well.
Specifically, it will vertically integrate its own supply chain where needed in ways that are deeply impractical for any single drone or robotics company to do.
Two examples, both of which Jordan and David said were the things that kept them up at night early on but no longer do (as much).
First, as discussed, while there are American companies like MP Materials and Vulcan Elements that can provide neo magnet block today, there is a gap in western suppliers that can cut, coat, and magnetize the magnets to the requirements needed for drone motors. Today, the block gets sent to Malaysia or China for cutting and coating, and back to the customer in the US. Leaving aside the added time or export restrictions, this is an issue: “magnets are fragile and like to stick to each other, so they’re difficult to buy the further away you are,” David explained. “That worried us for a long time. We’re less worried now because we know that world, we know how magnets flow around the world and how to get them.”
Westmag is exploring, by itself or with partners, opening up capacity to cut, coat, and magnetize its own magnets in America. This will be annoying, and come with high upfront costs, but it will give Westmag greater control over its supply chain, lower costs, simpler logistics, and the ability to get to a wider product mix.
Second, Westmag will buy electrical steel from Japan (they are clear that the material supply chain will be US and allied countries, not just US), but it will stamp and powder-coat them here to make their own stators.
Doing those things only makes sense if you’re planning to get to scale, but if you can do them, they allow you to build out a broader catalog more quickly, which helps get more scale, because you can serve a larger number of customers.
In motors and actuators, broadening the catalog to serve a high mix means making “smaller circles and bigger circles,” which sounds simple, but it really helps if you control your design and inputs.
“Planning out the product catalog,” David explained:
We realized that if we make our own stators, it’s not too hard to build a different stator size the next day. But if we have to design everything, send it out, and have someone else stamp it, you’ve got built-in cost and friction. That’s another huge reason to move upstream: it’s what enables higher mix.
On the actuator side, if you want to build a different actuator, controlling the motor matters, because the core of an actuator is the drone motor. If you don’t control that, your constraint is whatever motors you have available. I feel like I should say something smart after that, but it’s just true.
A couple minutes later though, he found something smart to say and came back. “Something else on the actuator side, since you control the motors…”
The design-cycle time for actuators right now, for almost anyone in the US, is in the months, because you rely on overseas suppliers to order pretty much everything. We saw the same thing with drone motors: you don’t just start making American motors that are better than China’s. To get good, you have to make a bunch. Same with actuators. So cutting the iteration time on actuators is super important: if you can only redesign four times a year, how far can you get? We think it’s key to making them reliable.
Moving fast and breaking things, along with scale economies, will bring other advantages, namely, process power.
“You can’t easily pull process knowledge out without literally pulling the people out of the neighborhood,” David acknowledged, “but a way to get it is to build and break much, much faster.”
You can start to see how all of this fits together into a strategy.
First things first, you need to get to scale.
That means, Jordan said, “Going to high-volume customers and asking, ‘What do you have? What are you using now?’ and benchmarking our initial SKUs against what they need in order to get larger offtake agreements against an aggressive manufacturing ramp, which justify making larger buys and investments of input materials.” Quite literally, the plan is to not reinvent the wheel, but to make the wheel that people need right now so that they can get enough wheel orders that it makes sense to make bigger input material orders and even to integrate upstream.
Then, if you can integrate upstream, you can spin your whole process faster.
If you can stamp your own stators, you can offer a larger motor on short-notice, which means cost efficiencies plus more demand and larger orders. Plus, if you control motors of a bunch of different sizes, you can iterate on actuator designs more quickly, and Tasmanian Devil your way into process power in months that would otherwise take years. You can then automate the parts of the process that are amenable to it, and start to gain small advantages over Chinese suppliers.
Eventually, riding drone motor volume demand that exists right now, and using it to fuel its parallel work on actuators, each of which has a drone motor at its core, you get to “high volume, high mix” offering on par with the Chinese, but on the same continent as its customers and more responsive to them.
To get there, they’ll need to operate like a fab in the near-term, a bit like a TSMC for motors and actuators.
Being a fab - serving the demand that customers have today - is how you get volume, and you can use that order to standardize, so that your processes get easier, your margins get fatter, and you become the platform on top of which anyone, from a scaling drone manufacturer to a pre-seed robotics team to a hobbyist high schooler, can build all manner of electric things that fly and roll and grab.
The North Star is essentially the T-Motor catalog with a “Buy Now” button and fast shipping.
All of this is hard but not impossible, and most of it requires getting to scale first and dominating the space. This doesn’t work as well if the drone motor and actuator supplier landscape becomes really fragmented, because it could mean no one gets to the scale required to offer great quality at a great price.
To that end, Westmag has some advantages.
While there are a number of motor startups popping up now that the space is hot, it really helps that Westmag has been building out its production capacity, relationships, know-how, and supply chain since before it was cool. It has a head start.
It also has the right investors. In August 2025, Westmag raised its $11 million Seed Round from a16z, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, NFDG, Menlo Ventures and a group of angels including SendCutSend’s Jim Belosic, Sam, and me. These firms are among the most likely to back something like this over the many years and hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars it will take to win. Their portfolios are also full of the companies that will be Westmag’s first customers if they can deliver.
As I wrote in Vertical Integrators Part IV, “Among startups, I expect we’ll see much less competition. The companies that show an early ability to execute against a big and credible enough vision will attract the top talent and the limited pool of investors willing to back such hard-to-underwrite companies, sucking the air out of the room for would-be challengers.” In an industry that requires scale more than raw innovation, this is a feature.
Still, the longer it takes to get to scale, the more opportunity there is for new entrants to come in and fragment the market.
Which is why it helps that Westmag got a little lucky.
Ok we’re back.
When David was running around talking to drone companies in 2024, most of them weren’t urgently trying to get out of China. They knew cerebrally they needed to diversify their supplier base as they scaled, as any company does, and probably would have preferred to diversify into a country other than China, but they were hooked on China’s cheap prices and availability. It just didn’t make sense to spend the reps figuring it out only to get more expensive and possibly lower quality motors, so at most, they’d diversify to two or three companies in China just in case T-Motor, the gold standard, had an issue.
All of that changed on January 15, 2025, five days before President Trump’s second inauguration and a couple of months after David had incorporated Westmag, when the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Jiangxi Xintuo / T-Motor by name for sending more than $9 million worth of items to Russian companies, including entities involved in Russian UAV production.
“There was a bit of a delayed reaction,” David remembered. They followed the rules and stopped buying, but they figured that some sort of alternative would pop up, and they had some inventory stored up in the meantime.
And there were workarounds. T-Motor unsubtly spun up “Lig Power” - like, if you go to T-Motor’s website and click “North America,” it just takes you to Lig Power, which is not sanctioned but also probably not your best long-term bet.
It wasn’t until April or May, when their motor shelves started to go bare, that they began to freak out. So while there had been companies taking China seriously - Skydio had already been sanctioned by China, and Neros was already serious about the risk - it was May 2025 when the American drone industry as a whole started thinking urgently about dual-sourcing.
Then Jordan left Slip and the duo really got to work, realizing they’d need to scale up faster than previously anticipated, which was both a blessing and a challenge. And the blessings kept coming.
In December 2025, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave Westmag an early Christmas present when it added Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) and UAS Critical Components Produced Abroad to its Covered List. Already-approved systems were grandfathered in, and it didn’t make using drones or motors you’d already bought illegal, but the Covered List meant that the FCC wouldn’t authorize new foreign-made drone components, and the list of components was broad: data transmission devices, communications systems, flight controllers, ground-control stations/controllers, navigation systems, sensors/cameras, batteries/BMS, motors, and associated software.
The FCC’s move was divisive in the industry. On the one hand, it makes sense: we probably don’t want to rely on Chinese motors for drones that may be used in a war with China. On the other hand, it included foreign countries beyond China (although there are exemptions for some allied suppliers) in an effort to support a Buy American agenda, while kneecapping American drone companies’ ability to produce.
In either case, it meant that American drone companies need to dual-source and find reliable domestic suppliers pronto.
That was the drone side. From the beginning, the plan was: there is a drone industry today, with fast-growing order volume today, so start with the drone motors, and use them to ramp production volume. Then, eventually, since every robot actuator has a drone motor inside of it, use the motor to expand into the potentially much larger robot actuator business over time, as that industry ramps.
Each drone has 4 motors, and Ukraine will need 28 million drone motors for 7 million drones this year; each humanoid robot has 20-40 actuators, and by some estimates, we will have 10 million of them in a decade, and three billion by 2060. That puts actuator demand in the tens to low hundreds of billions.
Westmag would have been golden riding drone motors down the learning curve, but the gifts of urgent demand just kept on coming.
In late 2024 and early 2025, when David was talking to robotics companies, he kept hearing that they just couldn’t get the changes they wanted made, that orders were inconsistent, and that Americans were simply at the bottom of the priority list.
You’d order 100 actuators, it’d come in two shipments, and on the second shipment they’d move the connector location or type, change the firmware, or completely change the mechanicals inside.
Jordan and David like to tell the story of a friend of theirs who’s a famous robotics guy over here who found a bug in the firmware for one of these Chinese actuators and sent them a bug fix, and the Chinese manufacturer just didn’t care.
Still, while they were casually looking for other paths, their #1 question back then was, “What is this going to cost?” China wins that question 100 times out of 100 today, especially at lower volume. They wanted to spec their own actuator designs to work with their specific robots, but you could find a contract manufacturer in China who was willing to do that pretty easily. As long as it was roughly to spec and cheap for the quality, they didn’t really care where it came from, so they stayed.
That started to change late last year. Something was in the air.
People began to realize that with AI taking off, robots would be the next big thing, and that, like AI, robots would be hardware constrained. Specifically, they’d need a lot more actuators than we can currently produce.
Quickly, the discussion went from “How much do my actuators cost?” to “Where are we going to get all of the actuators we need in one, two, five years? Can or should all the actuators come from China?”
David is friends with the head of hardware at this one robotics company, and every time they talked last year, the conversation was always about cost. Now, “every text conversation is about it not being in China, having more than one supplier, and planning for if China cuts us off.”
This is the definition of sovereignty in the future as David and Jordan see it: controlling your own robot supply chain.
The US Government seems to be coming around to this definition. Across government and industry, there is a growing belief that while we are about a decade behind in drones and their supply chains, and are taking actions to play catch-up, robotics is so nascent that we can try to be competitive from the jump. People are starting to think about what we can do to be more proactive in the robotics supply chain, which means eating more of the Electric Stack alongside our allies.
Because as we wrote of China’s bet in The Electric Slide, “for intelligence to truly matter, it needs energy and action.” Or as Aaron Slodov put it more pictorially:
Having the smartest computers doesn’t really matter if they can’t act on the physical world. To act on the physical world, they need bodies (whether humanoid, arms, or vehicles). And to build bodies, you need to control enough of the components to build them well.
Westmag’s initial bet was that if you aggregated demand from the nascent American drone and robotics industries, and made it easier for them to iterate quickly and grow, you could grow with them. It was a true bet, because both drone and robotics companies cared about cost above all else.
And Westmag could get to cost parity, with enough volume and time, but how do you solve that initial chicken and egg? How do you get the early orders that give you the volume to bring your price down to competitive levels?
For motors and actuators, as with many industries, from chips to solar panels, the initial push down the learning curve has come from Defense demand.
With the government’s actions, and the industry’s waking up to the fragility of relying on China for its components, price has become a secondary concern for a certain buyer, particularly one selling into Defense. The DoW is willing to pay more for American drones with American components, which means that the companies making American drones can afford to pay more for American motors. This is industrial policy through Defense demand like the type we discussed in Thank God for Data Centers.
This is referred to as the Red, White, and Blue Premium. It is not a long-term strategy. But it is a hell of a bootstrap and jumpstart.
“DC and Defense are near-term feral markets,” Sam D’Amico told me on a call last week, “but long-term, that’s actually a small part of the TAM. Robot actuators and consumer and commercial demand are. All of the electric cars, appliances, computers… brushless motors are in everything. And if you’re long robotics, you’re long actuators.”
Strategically, the RWB Premium is less about the actual price, and more about the fact that today, it’s where the volume is. Everything else flows from that.
Westmag has begun signing contracts with customers focused on Defense-related applications. In just the last few weeks, it has signed offtake agreements for hundreds of thousands of motors, and is in late-stage discussions with many other drone and robotics companies for similar deals. Commercial demand will be important to getting to scale, but it’s not where the highest volume demand is today. As Sam has pointed out many times, American demand is our greatest advantage.
The government could also potentially get more directly involved in lowering Westmag’s prices and increasing its volume, through subsidies, loans, and offtake agreements. There is precedent: it did deals with American neo magnet manufacturers MP Materials and Vulcan Elements last year, giving both access to cheap capital to fund CapEx, and offtake agreements to support scaled manufacturing. Even if the private market won’t buy the magnets (which is unlikely), the government set a price floor.
In either case, the trick is not to rest on Defense-related contracts, but to use them to fund the things that will make Westmag commercially competitive, potentially as a second-source and then as a primary source for growing drone and robotics companies.
That means doing the things that scale allows you to do, quickly.
As discussed, it will mean moving further upstream into magnet cutting and stator stamping. It will mean deeper partnerships with suppliers in the ecosystem, from electrical steel producers in Japan to machine parts manufacturers in Tennessee.
It will also mean expanding into a larger manufacturing facility in the Bay Area this year. While there are good reasons to spread its upstream facilities throughout the country, it makes sense to manufacture right next to the drone and robotics companies that will be its biggest customers, as Shenzhen has proven.
Speaking of things that Shenzhen has proven, in the beginning, it will mean making the motors the exact same way customers expect. That means designs optimized for Asian supply chains, for now: CNC-ing parts with complex shapes out of aluminum, very little design-for-manufacturing, manual assembly.
Over time, however, Westmag plans to adapt its manufacturing to modern American processes. As volume grows, designing a new way of making motors begins to make sense.
Westmag will design for manufacturing and, given that much of its initial costs come from labor, automation. It will redesign the same motor over time so it uses simpler machined parts and more processes that scale with capital instead of labor, like stamping, die-casting, molding, and near-net-shape parts, and so the geometry is something a machine, not a person, can make and assemble.
This is the other reason to build in San Francisco: it’s where the automation and robotics engineers are.
Working with these engineers, it will design the motor and the factory together, because as David put it, “The design of the factory floor and the design of the motor go hand-in-hand.”
One of China’s gifts is that all of its suppliers are in the same neighborhood, but that also means that it doesn’t make sense for any one of them to put everything under one roof. Westmag doesn’t have that luxury, so it will have to.
Surprisingly, Chinese suppliers still do a lot of this stuff manually, like running wires by hand. There aren’t many automated lines. There isn’t really even one “line,” they’ve discovered:
The “factory” in China isn’t usually in one place. There’s a dense neighborhood of specialized subcomponent shops connected by couriers. There are automated machines, but they’re at one address; a part gets built there, a courier takes it an hour later to another location a few blocks away where it is joined with another part, then a couple hours later that goes via courier somewhere else.
So part of what we’re doing, and will continue to do, is to vertically integrate, bring more processes and machines in house, and connect them. Essentially: connect everything by conveyors, not couriers.
The more it can do in-house, in this Installation Period for American motors and actuators, the faster it can spin, and therefore the faster its customers can, too.
The one place it won’t integrate is downstream, into end products like a full drone or robot, because the point of Westmag is to make affordable, reliable, fast, high-quality motors and actuators on top of which every other American electric product can build.
Without knowing exactly where the peculiarities of the supply chain will take it, it’s hard to know when Westmag will get to cost parity with China, but “it’s not crazy five-to-ten-year math at insane scale to be competitive. It’s classic industrial logic. The Idiot Index denominator on these things (the cost of the raw materials) is very low,” David said, “so even when they’re selling them for $20, there’s room for us to grow, scale, and lower the Index.”
That is a high bar, the unit-to-unit cost comparison, a hard-but-achievable-but-probably-not-necessary one to clear, because the real value if Westmag succeeds, and its raison d’être even if the US and China become best friends, is that if you can make critical components near the customers that use them and supply them reliably, the whole innovation machine spins faster.
“A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer,” Andy Grove wrote, and time has proven him right.
China has built this way and is now winning the Electric Stack; America has not, and is not.
Westmag’s key insight is that while China has an early lead, the race is just beginning. Both drones and robotics are very new industries.
As much as drones dominate the conversation today, thanks to the war in Ukraine, and as important as people think they will continue to be, I expect that they’ll be even bigger. For large industries, Defense is usually a very small initial market in retrospect. Packages and people will fly through the air faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than they crawl through terrestrial traffic today.
Robotics is even more nascent, with unit volumes in the thousands, and live debates as to which form factors and model architectures will win out. What everyone seems to agree on is that robotics is going to get much bigger.
OpenAI is getting back to its roots and back into robots…
Jensen Huang is getting excited about robots…
And just this week, The Wall Street Journal shared PitchBook data showing that venture investment in physical AI and robotics is on pace to pass an already-record 2025 in the first half of 2026 alone.
Wall Street estimates vary, but they all project unit volumes in the millions over the next decade, and an installed base in the billions in the decades beyond. We are currently operating in bars that will be barely visible above the x-axis looking backward.
The question is: who’s going to make all of the drones and robots, and therefore, whose economy will most benefit from their growth?
If you had had to bet, back when Nvidia was founded as a gaming graphics chip company in 1993, whether it, Intel, or AMD would be the biggest thirty years hence, you would have gotten ludicrously good odds on Nvidia. The chip market seemed set, even though, as we now know, it was barely in its infancy.
“Real men have fabs!”, former AMD CEO Jerry Sanders declared about chip manufacturing in the 1980s, and were he operating today, he might say the same thing about motors and actuators. DJI and Unitree make the most drones and robots, respectively, today, and both leveraged the know-how from their ecosystems to vertically integrate down to the motors and actuators, respectively.
But in 1987, a former Texas Instruments engineer named Morris Chang launched TSMC, which offered to fab everyone else’s chips for them. Nvidia, founded six years later, was born fabless and free to focus on architecture, software, developer ecosystem, cadence, and market selection. These are the things that have compounded into Nvidia’s moat over time.
Nvidia is now the largest company in the world by market cap, and it still fabs with TSMC. The second and third largest companies, Google and Apple, do too.
TSMC, by vertically integrating the hard, CapEx-intensive, process knowledge-driven work of fabbing chips and serving horizontally, made it possible for an entire ecosystem to flourish. It’s grown up alongside that ecosystem, and even now that the companies it’s enabled are cash-rich enough to build their own fabs, the compounding that their collective business has paid for would make it almost impossible to catch up. So even at scale, TSMC and its customers keep winning together.
A bet on Westmag is that we are at the same place in the Electric Age today that we were in the Information Age then.
Westmag’s hope is that by vertically integrating the hard, CapEx-intensive, process knowledge-driven work of making motors and actuators and serving horizontally, it will make it possible for the American drone and robotics ecosystem to flourish.
Because the company is still small, like the industries it serves, Westmag can afford to give American drone and robot companies the time of day. Because it’s vertically integrated, it can be responsive to their needs and spin up prototypes in days instead of months. Because of that, and because it’s in their backyard, it can shorten the iteration loop, so that its customers can iterate their way to better drones and robots than are made anywhere else in the world.
The real big bet on Westmag is that it’s not too late. That if you build a machine that marries American-style innovation with scaled manufacturing, the way we used to, and spin it really fast, slope will outrace intercept and the future might be built in America again after all.
Thanks to Jordan, David, Sam, and many others for helping me get smarter on motors.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox Friday with another Weekly Dose.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
2026-05-29 20:32:20
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday, and welcome to our 195th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
Man, just when I thought it was going to be hard to top last week’s Dose, we have an LDL cholesterol-fighting gene therapy, evidence that GLP-1s slow cancer, supersonic flight, and nanotech, and a Moon Base. We also have the coolest Science Breakthroughs roundup yet. Even a massive Blue Origin explosion can’t slow us down.
If you get through this and want even more optimism injected into your veins, check out this week’s essay:
Let’s get to it.
Hiring globally doesn’t have to be complicated
Hiring globally can unlock growth, but local laws, payroll, and compliance often slow startups down.
Deel’s free guide breaks down what an Employer of Record (EOR) is, how startups use EORs to hire internationally without opening entities, and when it makes sense to use one so you can scale with confidence.
For those keeping score at home, this is the second week in a row that we’ve led off with Eli Lily. Last week, their Reta Phase 3 trials showed astonishingly good results, and this week, they published the results of a phase 1, open-label, single-ascending-dose study on the VERVE-102 gene therapy targeting PCSK9, which is responsible for LDL cholesterol, which is in turn responsible for a lot of heart disease and deaths.
Now this is just a phase 1, and there were only 35 people involved, but a single dose gene therapy reduced PCSK9 levels “from 51% at the 0.3-mg-per-kilogram dose to 88% at the 1.0-mg-per-kilogram dose,” and showed corresponding reductions in the LDL cholesterol level “from 9% at the 0.3-mg-per-kilogram dose to 62% at the 1.0-mg-per-kilogram dose.”
This is a big deal! Globally, about 4.4 million deaths a year are attributable to high LDL cholesterol, roughly 7.8% of all deaths. Cardiovascular disease causes roughly 18.6 million deaths a year worldwide, so high LDL accounts for somewhere around a quarter of those.
Now, we might be able to knock out 4.4 million deaths a year with a shot.
PCSK9 inhibitors are not new. On a recent Invest Like the Best episode, Braidwell Managing Partner Alex Karnal called PCSK9 medicines “pretty much a free lunch”:
The headline here is PCSK9 medicines are amazing, because what they do is they today can lower our bad cholesterol, that LDL cholesterol, by 50%. And we now have outcome studies in patients at different degrees of having high cholesterol, having significant protection from ever developing and having a heart attack or a stroke. And so in patients that have previously had a heart attack or stroke, we can reduce that risk by over 20% in the future. And for people that are at high risk of having a heart attack or a stroke, the medicines that are approved and on the market today can lower that risk by about 25%.
With previous PCSK9 medicines, people would have to stay on them forever to continue to eat that free lunch. Now, if Lily’s early results hold, they will get all of the benefits in a one-and-done shot. Essentially, the drug edits your gene to be like the “population of people in the world that have a genetic mutation that conveys a massive advantage. They have a mutation in their PCSK9 gene, which means they don’t produce the PCSK9 protein.”
We are still a few years away from this miracle drug hitting the market, and there are still trials to be done, but this is a really big deal, not only because it’s an assault on LDL cholesterol and therefore heart disease, but also because it’s another example of our ability to see an advantageous mutation in a certain population, make a drug to mimic it, and knock more and more diseases off the list.
Plus, as the WSJ reported, a number of pharma companies are developing drugs to attack LDL’s cousin, Lp(a), or lipoprotein(a). Lp(a) is almost entirely genetic and currently untreatable. About 90% of a person’s Lp(a) level is fixed at birth, diet and exercise don’t lower it, and statins can actually raise it. So unlike LDL, which we have many tools for, there’s essentially no approved therapy for high Lp(a) today. Roughly one in five people globally have dangerously high levels, and that’s bad. Lp(a) hardens arteries and promotes clotting, which is why it’s so noxious in driving cardiovascular events.
So far, science has been powerless against Lp(a), both in treating it and in proving that lowering a person's Lp(a) will actually reduce heart attacks and strokes. Earlier drugs lowered the particle moderately but failed to reduce events in studies. The current bet from Novartis, Amgen, and, you guessed it, Eli Lilly is that new technologies can cut Lp(a) far more dramatically, with late-stage trials underway and Novartis's first Phase 3 results (pelacarsen) expected this year. Human genetics suggests it should work, but they don't know for sure.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US, and now we have even more data points suggesting that you should really figure out how to stay alive for the next few years, because thereafter, you may be able to stay alive for a very long time. “Medicine keeps getting better and better.”
Xavier Martinez for The Wall Street Journal
You thought we were done with Eli Lily? We’re not done with Eli Lily.
Just as the ink was drying on last week’s Dose, The Wall Street Journal published an article about GLP-1s’ cancer-fighting abilities. “A suite of four new studies suggest that people taking so-called GLP-1 drugs like Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro saw reductions in tumor progression, lower overall chance of death and less risk of developing breast cancer.”
In lung cancer patients, the rate of progression to advanced disease was cut roughly in half—10% in GLP-1 users versus 22% in the comparison group. Breast cancer patients showed a similar pattern, with progression rates of 10% versus 20%. Colorectal and liver cancers also showed statistically significant reductions.
These studies are from places like UT MD Anderson, University of Pennsylvania, and Cleveland Clinic, and while researchers don’t yet understand the mechanism, the research points to yet another miracle for this miracle drug.
I’m not even sure what to say at this point, so say it with me… get fucked, cancer.
In Riding the Leopard, I wrote, “I would like to live in the future in which we have spaceships and abundant energy and supersonic planes, the future in which car crashes and cancer are a thing of the past.”
I wasn’t expecting that future to come quite so soon. While GLP-1s go to work on cancer, Hermeus became “the world’s first privately developed, unmanned supersonic jet and the fastest unmanned aircraft flying today” when its Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 went supersonic at Mach 1.21 in an unmanned test flight. Huge congrats to AJ and the Hermeus team. I got chills watching the video.
Now, they’ll have more fuel to go even faster, more often. Yesterday, they announced that the Defense Innovation Unit expanded its contract by $159M to $219M to tackle high-Mach flight and payload release.
I may have dreamed too small. Hermeus is now gunning for hypersonic flight.
One thing that I forgot to mention in my vision for the future, but that I would like to add now and would very much like to see, is nanotechnology.
At the end of Where Is My Flying Car?, J. Storrs Hall paints a picture of the future we could have with abundant energy: flying cars, utility fog, the Weather Machine, a “space pier,” and maybe most tantalizingly, atomically precise manufacturing (nanotech), nanofactories and self-replicating machines that build objects atom by atom, collapsing the cost of physical goods the way semiconductors collapsed the cost of computation.
Nanotech is the vision Richard Feynman laid out in Plenty of Room at the Bottom, the one Eric Drexler theorized in Nanosystems, the one Hall imagines in Where Is My Flying Car?, and the one Neil Stephenson painted in The Diamond Age. If you can manipulate atoms one-by-one, you can build anything you can dream up.
Until now, though, it’s remained a dream. Drexler’s theory of positional mechanosynthesis, alongside Ralph Merkle and Robert Freitas, was attacked, most famously in the Drexler–Smalley debate, where Smalley's "fat fingers / sticky fingers" objection held that you couldn't do controlled positional chemistry at that scale.
Well, we can tell Smalley exactly where to stick his fat fingers now.
On Tuesday, Merkle, Freitas, and a number of researchers published a paper demonstrating simultaneous spatial and chemical control over the mechanosynthetic fabrication of carbon structures. Concretely, using a technique they call inverted-mode STM, carbon dimer (C₂) units are donated from surface-deposited molecules onto pre-patterned reactive sites on a hydrogen-passivated Si(100) surface. They show three escalating things: single-site C₂ donation, spatially patterned multi-site donation, and the stepwise assembly of polyyne structures through successive C–C bond formation. Their framing is that this establishes controlled mechanosynthetic donation as a foundational capability for programmable atomically precise fabrication.
For roughly forty years, Mechanosynthesis— using mechanical positional control to drive site-specific chemistry, building structures atom by atom — lived almost entirely in theory and computational chemistry. The canonical proposed primitive was a "dimer placement tool" that deposits C₂ units onto a workpiece to grow diamondoid structures. That is almost exactly what this paper demonstrates experimentally!
There is still a massive gap between this work and Hall’s nanofactory. They've built short carbon chains, one dimer at a time, with an STM tip, which is a primitive. The chasm to the vision is throughput and dimensionality: a single tip placing dimers serially is astronomically slow versus the massively parallel, self-replicating systems APM actually requires, and going from 1D polyyne chains to 3D diamondoid objects is its own huge challenge.
But come on! This thing that people said was impossible was just demonstrated to be possible! I am going to spend the weekend dreaming up all of the things I want to order from the nanofactory, like my own APM island a la The Diamond Age.
In the meantime, if you want to get smart on nanotech, I recommend Hall’s primer for the Abundance Institute and Jacob Rintamaki’s A Technical Review of Nanosytems.
On Tuesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and the NASA team held a press conference at its HQ in Washington to provide updates on the Moon Base program, a long-term lunar exploration and infrastructure initiative under the Artemis program aimed at enabling sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity at the lunar South Pole.
It also launched a Moon Base Website, complete with the hype video above and a timeline for the Moon Base. Because we are establishing a Base, on the Moon.
Isaacman & Co laid out the plan for three initial Moon Base missions. Moon Base I, targeted for no earlier than fall 2026, will use Blue Origin’s privately funded Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander to deliver NASA science payloads, including the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies instrument and a Laser Retroreflective Array, to the Shackleton Connecting Ridge. Moon Base II, planned for later in 2026, will use Astrobotic’s Griffin lander to deliver more than 500 kilograms (over 1,100 pounds) of cargo, including Astrolab’s FLIP rover, to mature lunar terrain vehicle mobility, autonomous operations, and logistics. Moon Base III will prioritize scientific payloads to expand understanding of the lunar surface.
Then, eventually, we’ll have people living on the Moon, which is a harsh mistress but a potentially perfect launchpad for humanity’s mission to Mars. What a universe.
Quick note: I think this might be the coolest Science Breakthroughs yet, with entries on the genetic architecture of complex traits, hallmarks of aging and mortality, homing pigeons relying on superparamagnetic macrophages for navigation, and armadillo-inspired morphing skeletons for robots. Science Breakthroughs is a roundup of the bleeding edge, the stuff that’s even earlier in its development than what we cover in the Dose.
I think it’s worth the subscription alone, and in general, I’m trying to share a lot more value with not boring world subscribers, including recent pieces like Riding the Leopard, Cowboy Space Corporation Case Study, and Thank God for Data Centers. I hope you’ll subscribe and join us.
2026-05-28 03:19:05
Welcome to the 2,232 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 267,788 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Wednesday!
A couple weeks ago, I asked if you wanted me to start sharing more off-the-cuff notes with not boring world subscribers, and the response was great, so we’re back. It’s a Wednesday afternoon, not my normal send time, but these are meant to be less formal and more, “I noticed something interesting, here are my quick thoughts.” This one happens to be a little longer than it is quick, but it’s one I wanted to get out for two reasons:
People hate AI Data Centers, and I think they’re wrong, even if they don’t like AI.
Because I keep hearing, reading, and seeing that AI Data Centers are funding new technologies before they’ve come down the learning curve, which might be a providentially big boon to Reindustrialization and all of the hard, physical things we want to see in the world.
It’s pretty beautiful that gaming chips that evolved from Apollo-funded integrated circuits are creating a product with so much demand that their houses can pay for all sorts of novel technologies, like the Apollo Program did.
Let’s get to it.
Hiring globally doesn’t have to be complicated
Hiring globally can unlock growth, but local laws, payroll, and compliance often slow startups down.
Deel’s free guide breaks down what an Employer of Record (EOR) is, how startups use EORs to hire internationally without opening entities, and when it makes sense to use one so you can scale with confidence.
There exists a vast pool of technologies that are potentially superior to those we employ today, but which require scale and learning curves to reach their potential.
Advanced nuclear reactors are one such technology - they are more expensive than alternatives today, but manufactured at scale, and benefiting from the learning curves required to get there, may become cheaper than other generation technologies. The cost physics are on their side, and nuclear is reliable, safe, firm, and clean.
The challenge with these technologies, in normal times, is that there is little economic incentive for the buyers who would enable the scale to stick their necks out. Natural gas is cheap and abundant, and it’s not that bad for the environment, compared to coal and oil at least, and the environment is someone else’s problem, anyway. And so, in normal times, we remain stuck in local maxima without the demand to push towards global ones.
Historically, these stalemates have cracked in a couple of main ways: Alpha Products and extraeconomic Buyers of Capabilities. These are essentially the same mechanism at different scales and with different motivations.
In The Electric Slide, we discussed the role that Alpha Products played in providing the initial demand that eventually brought each layer of the Electric Stack down their respective cost-performance curves. For lithium-ion batteries, the alpha product was the Sony Handycam. For neodymium magnets and motors, it was the 3.5” hard‑disk drive. For power electronics (IGBTs / inverters), it was the variable‑frequency drive (VFD) for industrial motors. For microcontrollers (MCUs), it was the calculator. Etc.
For each of these, the new technology was advantageous enough in a specific way to the end product that it was worth paying higher costs or sacrificing on other capabilities to capture those benefits.
Alpha Products, however, typically support components that are not multi-hundred million or multi-billion dollar projects in their own right.
The role of the extraeconomic Buyer of Capabilities in the development of new technologies is even better-understood. This is the DoD or NASA, mainly, buying technologies to confer a specific advantage, almost irrespective of their cost. This category of customer cares less about price than about capability.
Theirs is an important role because it gives new technologies the opportunity to get to scale, come down the learning curve, and ultimately compete in the much larger commercial market.
For a while now, but particularly over the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard some version of the same story over and over again:
“We are still going after our long-term mission, but to fund it, we’re planning to sell to data centers.”
Today, Data Centers are increasingly serving as Buyers of Capabilities, acting as something between a government and a commercial buyer. The Data Center is the meta-Alpha Product. If you can sell them something they need, fast, they have an almost bottomless bid.
This is true for obvious things like GPUs, inference chips, and DRAM, but it’s also true for companies that you wouldn’t typically associate with AI data centers, like supersonic turbines, enhanced geothermal, modular construction, high-voltage direct current grids, solid-state transformers, silicon photonics, optical fiber, lasers, batteries, and nuclear.
Many of these technologies have the potential to be better and cheaper than the incumbent technologies they aim to replace, but they have been too expensive and unproven to compete. With backlogs in all of the traditional inputs to Data Centers, however, developers are willing to pay up for new technologies that can deliver fast, which gives them the opportunity to scale up and cost down.
For these technologies, Data Centers act as a third type of Buyer of Capabilities, a commercial analog operating on DoD-style procurement logic but commercial timescales.
Given the size of the budgets, the relative smallness of any one input’s cost relative to the overall project cost and revenue opportunity, and the speed with which Data Centers are making decisions and putting down deposits, Data Centers may meaningfully increase the odds of success of hard tech companies and Vertical Integrators more than the market realizes.
Far from being the villains they are painted as (often using misinformation and largely due to their association with deeply unpopular AI), Data Centers may be the greatest accelerant of American Reindustrialization and a built-world future that benefits all people that we’ve ever seen.
They offer dilution-free capital (real revenue on a negative working capital cycle) to fund the big vision, and more importantly, the opportunity to get to scale and down the learning curve years earlier than would otherwise have been possible. This both accelerates timelines of things that might have worked, but more slowly, and makes companies that might otherwise have died in the Valley of Death viable.
Whatever your feelings are on AI, the furor towards Data Centers is misplaced. Hell, whether or not you think we’re in an AI Bubble barely matters here. In five years, this could all fall apart, and the world will be much better off. Data Centers are funding the future where no one else will.
This isn’t the first time that people have gotten mad that something that seems frivolous is sucking up so many resources. The immediate stuff - like how much money is being spent or power is being consumed - is an easy target, while the long-term benefits are hard to see.
With the benefit of hindsight and distance, the Apollo mission has become one of America’s proudest accomplishments. At the time, though, not everyone loved JFK taking us to the Moon. There were too many problems on Earth to be solved to waste all that time, money, and smarts on a lunar boondoggle.
In May 1961, Gallup asked Americans, “It has been estimated that it would cost the United States 40 billion dollars-or an average of about $225 per person-to send a man to the moon. Would you like to see this amount spent for this purpose, or not?” 58% of respondents said that they would not, another 9% had no opinion, and only 33% supported the mission.
President John F. Kennedy gave his canonical “We choose to go to the Moon” speech not because it was popular, but because it was unpopular and he needed to rally support.
It didn’t work that well. In a 1964 Gallup poll that asked “Do you think the United States should go all out to beat the Russians in a manned-flight to the moon–or don’t you think this is too important?”, 66% of respondents said that they did not think it was too important, and another 8% said “Don’t know,” which amounts to the same thing. In the summer of 1965, “one-third of the nation favored cutting the space budget, while only 16% wanted to increase it.”
Even a decade after NASA pulled off the near-impossible, in 1979, only 41% of Americans told an NBC/AP poll that the benefits of the space program outweighed the costs. By 1995, that had risen to 47%, by 1999 it hit 55%, and by the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing, in 2019, support had reached 64%.
One explanation is that, not having to pay the costs ourselves but getting to bask in the memory of victory, today’s Americans can of course look back and say it was worth it.
Another, though, is that over time, the real benefits, not at all obvious at the time, have become more clear.
Apollo’s critics were ultimately proven wrong, both because beating the Soviets to the Moon was awesome…
… and more directly because the absurdity of the task’s ambition coupled with the bottomlessness of its budget that they complained about were exactly the conditions needed to create terrestrially-useful innovations that would otherwise have taken much longer, or never been invented at all.
While the role that the Apollo Program played in inventing new technologies is probably overblown, it accelerated, scaled, and de-risked a lot of things that otherwise may not have gotten to sufficient scale or cost to impact our lives. Some of the technologies and products for which they served this role include:
Fireproof fabrics and flame-retardant materials (developed after the Apollo 1 fire), which made their way into firefighter suits and racing gear
Improved freeze-drying processes for food preservation
Mylar-based reflective insulation, which became the emergency space blanket
Advances in composite materials and ablative coatings
CAT and MRI imaging benefited from digital image processing techniques developed to enhance lunar photographs at JPL
Implantable cardiac pacemakers improved from bidirectional telemetry developed for astronaut biosensors
Cool suits (liquid-cooled garments) used for MS patients, burn victims, and racing drivers came directly from the spacesuit undergarment
Kidney dialysis machines used a chemical process developed to remove toxins from astronauts’ water
Black & Decker developed the technology to make cordless power tools for collecting lunar samples
NASA developed Memory foam (Temper Foam) for crash protection in seats
Water filtration using silver ions, based on the system that purified the Apollo crew’s water
Scratch-resistant lens coatings, derived from coatings developed for astronaut visors
Improved smoke detectors (the modern ionization-type was refined for Skylab, which leveraged Apollo hardware)
Even cleanroom protocols for handling lunar samples spread into pharmaceuticals and, relevant to today’s discussion, semiconductor manufacturing.
That’s just one program, albeit a very large one. If you zoom out to include the technologies that received early support from the DoD, the list includes pretty much everything that defines modern life.
The internet and TCP/IP directly, and Ethernet indirectly. Satellite communications, GPS, the inertial navigation systems that run in our phones and cars, and radio navigation. The mouse, windowing interfaces, and hypertext; the work that Doug Engelbart showed off in his “Mother of All Demos” was ARPA-funded. Public-key cryptography was invented for UK SigInt, Grace Hopper developed COBOL on the Navy’s dime, and DARPA funded the first AI labs at MIT, Stanford, CMU, and Stanford Research Institute for decades. The chips AI runs on, GPUs, and the CUDA software behind them, owe something to DARPA-funded parallel computing research. Siri’s lineage, for better or worse, through DARPA’s CALO speech recognition program at SRI. There are the more obviously military products, like the jet engine and the planes jet engines power, stealth coatings, night vision, radar and synthetic aperture radar, Lidar, ultrasound, drones, and infrared and thermal imaging. There are materials, like composites, including carbon fiber, titanium alloys, and advanced ceramics, all of which scaled through defense procurement. LEDs were funded through early signaling work, and digital photography found a buyer in early spy planes. In medicine, we have the DoD to thank for EpiPens, tourniquets, hemostatic agents like QuikClot, prosthetics, blood banking, and plasma storage. Penicillin was first mass-produced in a wartime crash program. And energy? Civilian nuclear power descended directly from Admiral Rickover’s Naval reactor program, lithium-ion battery research had defense funding, and solar photovoltaic cells were pulled forward by satellites’ unique power needs.
Military procurement is the closest thing that the United States has to a national industrial policy, and its worked. The military has funded the development of practically every general purpose technology of the past century, before the commercial market took those de-risked, cost-downed technologies and figured out how to bring them to the masses.
Of all of these, the cleanest case study and the one that maps most directly onto what’s happening in 2026, is the integrated circuit.
Fairchild Semiconductor was founded in 1957 as a transistor company, and its first big customer was the military.
Specifically, facing a threat from larger Soviet boosters that could launch intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could fit vacuum tubes, the US military, with its smaller boosters, had to invest in miniaturization, which meant transistors. Between 1958 and 1960, Fairchild’s revenue grew from $500k to $21 million, largely on the back of the Minuteman I program, for which it produced custom designs. Challenge was, as the number of transistors grew, the electronics industry ran into the “tyranny of numbers”: now that they could, engineers wanted to design circuits with thousands of components, all of which had to be wired together by hand.
So in Dallas, Texas Instruments’ Jack Kilby came up with his “monolithic idea.” “He realized that,” Carl Leonard writes, “instead of connecting separate components, an entire electronic assembly could be made as one unit from one semiconducting material by overlaying it with various impurities to replicate individual electronic components, such as resistors, capacitors, and transistors.” He had invented the integrated circuit (IC).
Three months later, in Mountain View, Fairchild co-founder Bob Noyce arrived at a similar idea from a different angle. Starting from the planar process, invented by Jean Hoerni in early 1959, Noyce realized that you could build transistors flat on a silicon wafer, with all the connections on the top surface, protected by a layer of silicon oxide. He wrote in his notebook, “In many applications now it would be desirable to make multiple devices on a single piece of silicon in order to be able to make interconnections between devices as part of the manufacturing process, and thus reduce size, weight, etc., as well as cost per active element,” and filed a patent that year.
While there are differences between the ICs they developed (Kilby’s used Geranium and Noyce’s silicon, for example), the two are credited as the co-inventor of the IC. What matters for our story is 1) the IC may not have been developed without demand from the Air Force, Army, and Navy, which were each spending real money on parallel attempts to solve it, and 2) Fairchild was now in the IC business.
In 1961, after starting at $1,000 per chip on tiny pilot runs the year before, Fairchild brought the integrated circuit to market at $120 per chip. The challenge was, no one really needed an integrated circuit, not enough to pay that price. Any electronics firm could wire together discrete transistors to do the same thing for a fraction of the price. As Britannica puts it, “a buyer had to have a serious space constraint to justify purchasing ICs.” Fortunately for Fairchild, NASA had a serious space constraint.
In early 1962, MIT’s Instrumentation Lab, which was responsible for the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), placed a test order for 100 ICs at $43.50 per unit. Meanwhile, getting ahead of volume and hoping to use scale to rev aerospace demand, Noyce cut the price of the IC from $120 to $15, an 87.5% drop, while still charging NASA and MIT premium prices to fund scale. “Noyce slashed prices, too, gambling that this would drastically expand the civilian market for chips, Chris Miller wrote in Chip War. “In the mid-1960s, Fairchild chips that previously sold for $20 were cut to $2. At times Fairchild even sold products below manufacturing cost, hoping to convince more customers to try them.”
Meanwhile, the government funded the gap. That November, MIT decided to go with Fairchild’s IC, or more specifically, its Micrologic computer made up of ICs. By 1963, MIT was consuming 60% of US IC production for the AGC; other military and aerospace buyers made up the rest. In a 1964 article for IEEE, Noyce wrote, “Military and space applications accounted for essentially the entire integrated circuits market last year, and will use over 95 per cent of the integrated circuits produced this year.”
In 1965, the year that Gordon Moore wrote the Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits paper that birthed Moore’s Law, ICs had reached cost parity with discrete components, at around $10, and were beginning to beat them. It was around this time that the Minuteman II program, which now used Texas Instruments ICs, became the technology’s largest buyer. That meant two things – 1) there were multiple large buyers of ICs and 2) there was competition – which combined caused Noyce to cut prices again, down to $2, and again, to $1. The cash coming in from Apollo allowed him to attack the commercial market with lower prices.
And it worked. By the end of the decade, America beat the Russians to the Moon, and Burroughs released the B2500 computer, the first to use ICs.
From that point forward, Moore’s Law has largely been driven by demand from the much larger and faster-moving commercial market. But the IC would not have come down the cost curve so quickly – and Moore’s Law, that self-fulfilling prophecy, may never have been coined or executed against – without the early space and military demand. It is to these Buyers of Capabilities that we owe the computer-powered world we inhabit today.
Something similar might be happening with Data Centers today.
There is a sentiment floating around that we can’t build hard things in America anymore, but by any measure, modern AI data centers are hard assets to build and operate, and we are building a lot of very big ones. Western hyperscalers, labs, and neoclouds will spend something like$750 billion this year and more than $1 trillion next year building them. Goldman estimates that AI CapEx will take $7.6 trillion of capital between 2026 and 2031 across Compute, “Data Centers,” and Power.
This is an enormous amount of CapEx, absolutely, historically, any-way-you-slice-itly. With US GDP around $32 trillion, this year’s spend represents 2.4% of GDP. Assuming GDP grows by an aggressive 3% next year, AI CapEx will account for 3.1% of GDP. For context, the Manhattan Project reached 0.4% of GDP, the late-90s telecom bubble reached 1.2%, and even the Apollo Program only hit 0.4%. To find a more GDP-dominating project, you’d need to look to one of the two World Wars, the New Deal, or the Railroad Boom.
For a little more context, the $15 billion per year that Anthropic will pay SpaceX for the use of two of its Colossus data centers is roughly 60% of NASA’s entire annual budget.
2026-05-22 20:51:22
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome to our 194th Weekly Dose of Optimism. I’m emailing you from beautiful Utah, where I attended the Abundance Institute Gala last night and got to talk nuclear with Oklo’s Jake DeWitte and General Matter’s Scott Nolan, and where I’ll be spending today at the state’s Operation Gigawatt Conference.
It’s hard not to feel the optimism in the mountain air. When we started writing the Dose a few years back, nuclear was a controversial dream. Today, we’re heading into the Memorial Day Weekend that kicks off the summer during which multiple new reactors will go critical for the first time.
Plus, you’re about to read one of the most action-packed Doses in Dose history.
Things are moving fast, and mostly for the better. Happy Memorial Day Weekend, y’all.
It turns out, my house has been making me worse at writing. Sorry about that. I have it under control now.
Lightwork came by my place recently and tested our air and water quality, light sources, likelihood of mold, electromagnetic exposure (turns out electromagnetism does run the world), and household products. It was an awesome experience. I learned a lot, including that my home’s air quality and lighting were undermining my energy levels, our shower water was full of VOCs whose vapor I was inhaling, and a whole lot more.
Lightwork’s assessments are concierge evaluations where they test every aspect of your home that could be impacting your health, produce a science-backed, in-depth report on all their findings, and then help you fix all the issues they uncover. I recommend them. Check them out!
Eli Lily
Yesterday morning, Eli Lilly reported topline results from TRIUMPH-1, the Phase 3 trial for retatrutide in adults with obesity and at least one weight-related comorbidity. Here’s a summary of the results from Superpower founder and peptide enthusiast Max Marchione:
28.3% bodyweight lost on 12mg over 80 weeks
70.3 pounds on avg. or 31.9 kg
45.3% of patients hit 30%+ weight loss (this is bariatric surgery territory)
30.3% weight loss (85 lbs) at 104 weeks in higher-BMI patients
65.3% of 12mg patients dropped below the obesity BMI threshold
19% loss on 4mg over 80 weeks (47.2 lbs) with fewer dropouts than placebo (4.1% vs 4.9%)
significant drops in blood pressure, triglycerides, non-HDL cholesterol, waist circumference, and hsCRP
no cardiac or liver signals
These are bariatric surgery results in a shot, with a bunch of freebies thrown in.
People have been excited about reta on social media for a while, but it’s still gray market, so this is a key step towards getting it to the general public, and just an astonishing set of results. People are losing 28.3% of their bodyweight, or 70 pounds, in less than two years!
For context, Zepbound (tirzepatide) tops out around 20-22% weight loss in its big trials, and the previous-generation Wegovy (semaglutide) at around 15%.
Retatrutide is the first triple hormone receptor agonist (GIP + GLP-1 + glucagon). We previewed this back in Dose #175, in our piece on grey-market peptides and Gen3 GLP-1/GIP/glucagon agonists. The author of the essay we covered, Not for Human Consumption, called these drugs “the holy grail of weight loss medications” before any of them had a Phase 3 readout. Now one of them does.
This is Lebron-level. Unbelievably hyped out of the gate, and then exceeds the hype.
As with all of these miracle drugs, there are positive side effects beyond weight loss. Retatrutide reduced osteoarthritis knee pain by an average of 75.8%, with more than 1 in 8 patients reporting they were completely free of knee pain at the end of the trial. LDL cholesterol dropped 20%. 72% of prediabetic participants returned to normal blood sugar levels. Seven more Phase 3 readouts are expected this year, including diabetes, sleep apnea, chronic back pain, and cardiorenal outcomes.
Get ready to get hot and healthy. It’s Reta Summer (in 2027).
“Before we named the stars, before we mapped the atom, we asked ourselves an impossible question: which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
On Monday, Ben Lamm's Colossal Biosciences announced that it has hatched 26 healthy chicks from a fully artificial egg, an oval printed shell coated in an oxygen-permeable membrane that lets an embryo develop from poured-in yolk to pipping bird, without a biological eggshell. Researchers crack a freshly laid fertilized egg, pour the contents into the artificial shell (Colossal adds ground-up calcium back in, because the embryo eats the shell as it grows), and watch through the top window as eyes form, vasculature spreads, and, 18 days later, a chick taps its way out.
Real scientists will tell you (and MIT Tech Review's Antonio Regalado dutifully did) that growing birds outside the shell isn't new. A Japanese group hatched quail in 1998. Katsuya Obara hatched chickens under transparent plastic film in 2024. Colossal's marketing is, per Regalado, "pure Hollywood." Which is kind of fair but too clucking cynical.
Colossal’s real engineering advance is the membrane, which lets the embryo pull enough oxygen from ambient air that the system doesn't need supplemental gas. Previous shell-less methods did, and chicks tended to die. I like the version in which the chicks live, Regalado.
While this experiment was on a chicken, we have plenty of those. Colossal likes to de-extinct. Its stated goal is the 12-foot, 500-pound South Island giant moa, which laid four-liter eggs no living bird is large enough to surrogate. Colossal staff are reportedly already calling the prototype scaled-up version the "salad spinner." More immediately, the artificial egg is a tool for genetic rescue of endangered birds and, as per our discussion in Dose #186 with not boring capital portfolio company Neion Bio, a substrate for transgenic chickens producing therapeutic proteins in egg whites at a fraction of mammalian cell culture costs.
This is the first member of what Colossal calls its "exogenous development" family. Up next: artificial wombs for marsupials.
With this chicken breakthrough, it feels like humans have crossed a road.
For the entirety of its existence, human civilization has lived on a single celestial body: Earth. The current paradigm, in which human civilization is confined to one planet, exposes humanity to existential threats that are unpredictable and uncontrollable on a planetary scale. By moving beyond the only home we have ever known, we ensure species-level redundancy and that the light of consciousness will not be tied to a single planet subject to the inevitable hazards of a harsh and vast universe. We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs.
On Wednesday, SpaeX dropped what may have been the most highly-anticipated S-1 in the history of the planet (until Anthropic files later this year). You can read it here.
Financial highlights include:
Revenue: $4.69B (run-rate ~$19B)
Operating loss: $(1.94B), but Adjusted EBITDA of +$1.13B
Connectivity (Starlink) prints cash: $3.26B revenue, $1.19B operating income in just the first quarter. Its revenue is growing ~50% per year, and profitability is growing faster.
AI is losing money for now…: $818M revenue, $(2.47B) operating loss in Q1. Capex on AI alone was $7.7B in Q1, more than Space ($1.05B) and Connectivity ($1.33B) combined, by far.
But has the monster TAM: AI infra, consumer subscriptions, digital advertising, and enterprise applications - the AI segment - has a company-estimated TAM of $26.5 trillion, which seems small when you consider the size of the universe and the potential to spread Enterprise Applications throughout it.
SpaceX also disclosed that it’s doing a second compute deal with Anthropic, in which Dario & Co. will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion per month for Colossus 2, which is nearly as much as entire SpaceX makes now. For now, it’s selling compute on earth, but per the S-1, it plans to begin deploying orbital compute in 2028 and scale it to 100 GW of compute launched annually, which would make Colossus seem like a pale blue dot.
Starlink, which had been the bull case until AI, is at 9,600 satellites, 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries, and now accounts for ~75% of all active maneuverable satellites in orbit.
There is no one operating at a higher level than Elon and the SpaceX team, across everything from terrestrial data centers to rockets to satellites to, soon, Terafab. After more than 20 years, it’s awesome to see the company go public (and generate some much-needed DPI for the venture and seven-layer-SPV ecosystems). Is the price a little high? Maybe, yeah, sure. But what would you pay to own a Scarce Asset that catches Statue of Liberty-sized rockets with chopsticks…
We’ll find out in June.
In the meanting, after scrapping the launch of Starship v3 last night, SpaceX is giving it another go today. What a way to launch summer.
Take n dots on a piece of paper. How many pairs of dots can sit exactly one unit apart from each other?
Paul Erdős posed this in 1946, conjectured the answer grows just barely faster than n, and offered cash for a resolution. For 80 years, the best constructions anyone could find were boring square grids, and most of combinatorial geometry treated Erdős's upper bound as essentially right.
This week, an internal general-purpose OpenAI reasoning model produced a proof that disproves it. The model isn’t math-specific, it just thought for a long time and burned an estimated ~$1,000 max worth of tokens, which is pretty affordable for an 80 year old unsolved problem! It found that there's an infinite family of point arrangements that beat the grid, polynomially. Erdős was wrong, and his “favorite problem” is settled.
How’d it pull it off? Instead of more clever geometry, it pulled in algebraic number theory (specifically, infinite class field towers and Golod–Shafarevich theory, of course, why didn’t I think of that) to construct number systems with the right symmetries, then read the geometric configurations off of those. No human had tried this connection. Thomas Bloom thinks it will unlock other long-stuck problems in discrete geometry.
And, importantly, it’s verified. Last October, OpenAI claimed GPT-5 had solved ten Erdős problems; on inspection, it had just surfaced answers from the literature. This time, it got external review by Fields Medalist Tim Gowers and Will Sawin at Princeton, with a companion paper. Gowers's verdict: "if a human had written the paper and submitted it to the Annals of Mathematics, I would have recommended acceptance without any hesitation." It also got endorsements from Noga Alon, Melanie Wood, Arul Shankar. Shankar said the models “are capable of having original ingenious ideas, and then carrying them out to fruition.” The full proof is available as a public PDF.
Ten months ago, frontier models were at IMO-gold level. Really smart high schoolers, basically. Now, they’re doing Annals-worthy novel work.
I’ve been more skeptical about AI than I normally am about new technologies, and less excited than the average person in tech. Per the evidence that keeps coming out, I’ve been wrong. On the business side and the capabilities side, the pace has been truly remarkable, and I can’t wait to see what problems they’ll solve for us in the years ahead.
Jim Belosic (SendCutSend)
Jim Belosic started SendCutSend in 2018 because he couldn't get custom metal parts fast enough for the cars and motorcycles he was restoring. Eight years later, bootstrapped to this point on credit cards, savings, a PayPal loan, and bank-financed machines, the Reno laser-cutting and bending shop is doing roughly $200 million in revenue, growing 100% year over year, and turning into one of the most important on-demand manufacturers in America.
Austin Vernon's February essay Speed Can Reindustrialize America is the best piece on why the company is so impressive and potentially important. Vernon's argument is that the US is great at high-volume manufacturing and terrible at low-volume, short-lead-time custom work because soft costs (quoting, programming, billing, all the white-collar overhead) swamp the actual fabrication cost on small orders. SendCutSend's whole company is an attack on soft costs: instant quotes, one-click buying, software-routed production. It’s generating ~$275K revenue per employee, and the market would support a hell of a lot of employees.
Interestingly, Patrick Collison was the one person Vernon thanked for feedback, right above the “Funding Opportunities Apendix.”
And I guess Collison took it literally, because he reached out to Belosic about investing, and although SCS had never taken outside capital, he decided to take money from the Collisons, Sequoia (Andrew Reed), and Paradigm (Matt Huang) to go bigger, faster.
Jim and SCS are easy to root for and have become a cult classic over the past few years. Now, the cat’s out of the bag, the money is in the bank, and IT’S TIME TO BUILD.
In other great news for building stuff here, Amca raised $300M at $1B+ from Caffeinated and crew. Amca builds and modernize factories to design and produce critical aerospace and defense components that are supply-constrained and often sole-sourced.
Jai Malik’s eighteen-month-old El Segundo startup already runs factories in California, Iowa, and New York, supplies components for the F-35, and uses its RAPID software platform to deliver parts to BAE, Airbus, Textron, Honeywell, and GE Aerospace 67% faster than the legacy defense supply chain. Now, it can make more of the critical components on which the country runs.
2026-05-16 20:52:13
Trying something new for not boring world subscribers. A little case study as a follow up to an essay I wrote last year called The Great Differentiation.
I saw a great case study on the Great Differentiation this week, so put together some quick thoughts off the dome, as I continue to study how companies tell their stories in new and interesting ways. Let me know what you think.
Earlier this week, I saw a headline that a company called Cowboy Space Corporation had raised over $200 million to build rockets whose upper stages are just foldable data centers. My first thought was who would be dumb enough to compete with Elon in launch at this point and my second was that this had to be the peak.
Then, I saw that it was Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt’s company, Aetherflux, rebranded and expanded, and I got a little more interested, because at least they’d been planning to do energy in space since before data centers were cool, and because turning Robinhood money into sci-fi energy and compute moonshots is exactly how you should billionaire. This is Choose Good Quests.
I wrote about it in the Dose yesterday, because if nothing else, it’s bold.
But in that process, I watched the videos. There’s the one I included in the Dose, which was pretty cool because it had a tumbleweed, and some cowboy-adjacent music, and because the product itself - the upper stage that unfurls into a data center powered by a bunch of solar panels - is arresting, and because calling space “The High Frontier” is both cool and relevant for a company now called Cowboy Space Corporation.
If it were just for that video, though, I wouldn’t be writing this note. This is the one that made my fingers do the keyboard two-step:
It’s so fucking weird when you watch it, right? Baiju, who I’ve never met and I’m not sure watching this if he’s really like this or if this is a bit, is just talking into the camera while he slaps cowboy hats on his team’s head.
