I spent the past week at Deep Tech Week SF.
There were so many great discussions and almost every presentation and conversation led back to manufacturing and domestic supply chains.
For example, the fusion industry is going to need massive amounts of HTS wire (high temperature superconducting wire) for fusion technology to scale and Metox is working hard and fast to fill the needs by adding massive manufacturing capabilities in North Carolina (they already make a lot of HTS Wire in Houston).
The fusion industry is also in need of large quantities of large capacitors and there are very few US manufacturers of these. These are big industrial capacitors.
Many of these fusion businesses are well funded and expect to ramp up production rapidly as they approach commercialization.
Another exciting space that is reaching bottlenecks in domestic supply chains is battery production. I spent time talking to the teams in charge of battery design and production at Tesla and Panasonic. The machines they use are very large and run 24/7 365 days a year and require a large amount of splitter sharpening and Mandrel polishing because of the massive volumes that they run through.
The engineers say that they have a hard time finding these services consistently.
Finally, while there is a lot of excitement around humanoid robotics and full lights-out automation on the investor and public side of the conversation, pretty much every engineer and manufacturer I met with says that there is no way manufacturing will be fully automated to lights-out levels. They are all confident that these technologies will help to make some of the processes easier but they also want to see more humans enter the field of manufacturing as quickly as possible.
