Good morning, fellow travelers. I’m sure some of you pulled longer shifts yesterday, or last night, or early this morning — hell, maybe you haven’t even slept yet — dealing with the fallout from the AWS outage. Same here; it knocked out our web hosting for a good bit of the day, and locked me out of satellite wifi on two flights yesterday. Needless to say, this was a burn-the-midnight-oil edition, but we got it done.

Now, to the real business — today’s dispatch: American Dreams, megaprojects, 21st-century cities, datacenter ruckuses, checklist manifestos, humanoid hype, the Fantastic 40, and more.

👇 Let’s get into it.

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With fewer than 75 days left until 2026, America’s 250th birthday, we wanted to reflect on the fact that the country is finally dreaming big again. After decades of incrementalism and infrastructure theater, we're suddenly talking about building at a scale that would make Robert Moses jealous — and Ayn Rand blush.

Call it a Megaproject Moment. Or don’t. Labels matter less than the raw fact that private dollars, public incentives, technological advances, and strategic necessity have converged to create a once-in-a-generation construction supercycle.

And it’s a cycle unlike anything in recent memory: VCs backing city-builders, Taiwan’s crown-jewel semiconductor company betting on Arizona, and Elon literally incorporating his own municipality.

A megaproject, technically speaking, is an investment with a capital cost that crosses the $1 billion threshold. These are massive physical works, unique in their scale, complexity, and risk. And right now, America is awash in $1B+ undertakings: fabs, factories, data centers, shipyards, and industrial parks the size of small cities.

(Editor’s note: No, something like California’s forever-delayed high-speed rail project doesn’t make the cut. After $100B+ spent since 2008 and barely any track laid, that is merely a MINO: Megaproject In Name Only.)

These $1B+ bets are audacious in nature, with the potential to reshape local economies, entire industries, and in select cases, the global technological balance of power (see: TSMC Arizona).

With TSMC Arizona, we’ve seen what we’ll call The New Physics of American Building. The project went from desert to producing 4nm chips in just over three years. That’s fast, even for Taiwan! This pace reflected a precise, factory-style approach, with modular components, parallel workflows, and heavily imported expertise streamlining what often takes half a decade or more.

California Forever raised $900M to build a brand-new city in Solano County, replete with net-zero energy districts, drone highways, autonomous shuttles, and a research campus. But fierce local opposition and regulatory hurdles conspired to stop the greenfield plan in its tracks.

Rather than fold, the California Forever team has pivoted. Last week, the developer proposed attaching their project to Suisun City, tapping existing roads, sewers, and political goodwill, and growing from there. And the scale still shocks:

Private city-building is in a brave new age. There’s Esmeralda, a meticulously planned, walkable village proposed for some 90 minutes north of SF. And then, of course, there’s SpaceX’s Starbase, Texas: 1.5 square miles, ~500 residents, and its own government, roads, utilities, and beach access, all built to support rocket Starship production and testing.

Since January, by our count, American megaprojects have swelled to 40+ announced ventures. These projects, along with smaller ones, add up to more than $1.3T in capital commitments.

From silicon foundries in the desert to battery giga-factories in the heartland, from next-gen shipyards on the coasts to whole new cities sprouting where none stood before, this is our moment to build at a scale that matches our promise. But remember that for every TSMC Arizona (success), there's a Foxconn Wisconsin (remember that $10B LCD factory that became a storage warehouse?).

The bottlenecks today are mundane and merciless:

As America hurtles toward its semiquincentennial, the Megaproject represents a fascinating paradox: a bet on atoms in an age of bits, on geographic clustering in an era of remote dispersion, on American industrial muscle memory that’s been dormant for a long time.

Regardless, the strategic logic is clear: Every advanced chip made in Arizona is one that doesn't depend on the Taiwan Strait staying peaceful. Every Rust Belt gigafactory is a hedge against battery mercantilism. Every new shipyard is a admission that naval power still matters in a West obsessed with software and services.

Here's our take: Say 30% of these projects fully deliver on their promises. Another 40% pivot into something useful but different. And the remaining 30% will become cautionary tales and abandoned infrastructure. We’d argue that’s a bet worth taking, because the successful 30% would solve rate-limiting steps, build the workforce we need, and reshape domestic capabilities for the next half-century.

The builder knows that it’s the follow-through, not the announcement, that counts. Execution is what separates vanity projects and back-of-a-napkin dreams from true, strategic, and bankable bets on our future prosperity, security, and global leadership. All of this is to say, to realize our dreams, we just need to do what we say we’re going to do. And if we do that, then we can turn this Megaproject Moment into an enduring Era.

And wouldn’t that be the best 250th birthday present of them all?!

Ask And Ye Shall Receive

You all have been sharing fantastic resources (books, mental models, frameworks, etc.) that explain how you build, work, and lead — which in turn would be useful in helping others in this community build the next great century.

👆 Here’s one recommendation that stands out, courtesy of Laura Crabtree, CEO and Co-Founder of Epsilon3 (who, in Jeff Crusey’s words, is “a badass CEO”).

Written by surgeon Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto is about how a simple checklist, first proven in operating rooms to prevent life-threatening mistakes, generalizes across aviation, construction, and business as a framework for managing complexity and getting things right when expertise alone isn’t enough.

We felt for anyone building hardware, managing teams, or coordinating complex operations: the unglamorous stuff (process, discipline, verification — checklists!) is often what separates success from disaster. Thank you Laura!

Point #1: The AWS outage mentioned up top is a useful reminder of how brittle our digital backbone can be. Hyperscalers often target six-nines reliability (99.9999% uptime, or under 32 seconds of downtime per year), yet Monday’s failure at US-EAST-1 in Northern Virginia proved even that exacting standard can crumble under strain. When hundreds of millions of users and tens of billions of dollars of commerce depend on your infrastructure, every fraction of a nine matters…a lot.

Point #2: The outage originated in Northern Virginia, ground zero of America’s datacenter boom. Which brings us to our main point: datacenters have now become a bipartisan punching bag in VA state politics. In Gainesville, dueling candidates for a county supervisor seat found rare unity:

The Commonwealth hosts 26% of all U.S. capacity and ~13% of all global capacity. It has more capacity than any other state or country on a per capita basis. If even its own backyard is pushing back, the tech industry needs to take note.

Industrial humanoid robotic developers saw 17 fundraising rounds in Q3, more than any other market and good for a back-to-back quarterly record (with 23 deals in Q2). ICYMI, we recently wrote an Antimemo on humanoids.

In a pointed (& popular) X post last week, Valor Atomics CEO/cofounder Isaiah recalled his early fundraising days, when “no” was less about physics or the market for nuclear reactors, and more due to VCs’ perceived fears about raising huge future rounds. In a scale-obsessed era, many investors treat war chest size as the master key to every hard-tech door.

Lesson: Beware of pattern-matching. In a world of bits, where products blur and distribution is the moat, the biggest pile of cash can look like the straightest path to advantage. But as you all know, the SaaS investing model does not map to atoms. In hard tech, capital is an indispensable amplifier, to be sure, but the constraint is execution, set by the founder, established by the team they build, and measured by how fast and how far they can go. Not by how much they can raise!

Coatue has refreshed its Fantastic 40, an index of companies “best positioned to lead” in an AI/technology-driven world. By our tally, ~⅓ are predominantly hardware-focused, ticking up a bit from June. Throw in the frontier AI labs, plus the Mag7 & their Chinese counterparts deeply linked with cutting-edge models, and you’re looking at well over half the list. Yet another nail in the coffin for the age of SaaS maximimalism.

Also, a notable inclusion worth flagging here: GE Vernova, an 18-month-old spinoff riding a booming multi-year backlog for turbines (fueled by — shocker — AI data centers’ power needs, where natural gas is currently the only game in town for spinning up and scaling quickly).

Why Google DeepMind has a research partnership with Commonwealth Fusion Systems // CoreWeave and Poolside aim to build 2 GW (!) datacenter in West Texas near the Permian Basin // Amazon shares first look at new nuclear facility in Washington // Apollo’s chief economist: trade war’s negative effects “offset by AI boom and the Industrial Renaissance” // An idiot’s guide to buying a CNC machine // Microsoft reportedly looking to move Surface mfg out of China // DOE closes $1.6B loan guarantee to reconductor ~5,000 circuit miles across IN, MI, OH, OK, & WV // Waymo’s expanding to London, plans to launch commercial service next year // a head-to-head is brewing between Waymo & London hometown hero Wayve, which is in talks to raise $2B from SoftBank & Microsoft.

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