For a hundred years, the way we build has been going backwards. Cheaper, flatter, more forgettable. Our cities are filling with buildings nobody will miss. Until now. Introducing The Building Arts Company.

Today, after 7 years in stealth, I, @emeskey and our co-founders are proud to announce @keplercompute. The world is much better off when we give power & intelligence to the people. When everyone can become their highest selves by pairing their human creativity with the exponentially rising intelligence from our magnificent computers. Our goal is to unlock the power of frontier intelligence for everyone by pushing memory and logic chip manufacturing to the limits of physics. To achieve this, we will move the world from one of compute scarcity to abundance where we can make orders of magnitude more chips per dollar and can lower datacenter energies to the limits of physics. We will use physics to ensure we have enough chips and that we can power them on. Why is compute scarce? Today's dominant approach - shrinking transistors with EUV - has run into $20B-$40B fabs that take years to build. Sized against that risk, the industry (quite rationally!) grows capex much slower than AI demand that can grow 10x in a year. In the current system, scarcity is built in. A different way is possible. We founded Kepler on the following beliefs: 1. It is possible to build leadership chips without a dependence on EUV 2. It is possible to achieve multiple orders of magnitude more intelligence per watt by evolving chips 2D Silicon to 3D Beyond silicon 3. It is possible to get much closer to the physical limits of computing than we are today while staying within mainstream digital computing Memory is the biggest binding constraint on AI compute and so we start with a new frontier of AI memory- approaching the bandwidth per watt of SRAM, going up to 10x beyond the capacity of HBM. We use 3D and materials innovations that allow for leapfrogging leading nodes while requiring no EUV lithography and allowing us use fabs that already exist. Our team co-led one of the industry's first 3D chip-stacking technologies, has led and scaled seven generations of DRAM and multiple logic designs into billions of chips. We built the world's first commercial physical synthesis tool and techniques at the heart of the logic design industry and solved long standing challenges in ferroelectrics, invented beyond CMOS logic devices. We would love to work with you to reinvent chip manufacturing here in America. We have raised $468m, built our own fab and our AI memories sample this year and ramp to production next year. We are allocated for 2027 and will be scaling in America by 2028. We are open for business, please get in touch to work together. We are also growing the group of Keplerians and would love to work with you. Learn More @ Kepler: keplercompute.com/ Read our story in @WIRED: wired.com/story/a-new-dollar…

Manny is proposing a citywide subway system. mannyforsf.com/citywide-subw…

True story. I had friends who moved to NY from SF, and moved back a year later. I asked them why and their response was very short: "The produce."

This robot is both a hand and a humanoid. Handroid reuses its fingers as limbs, allowing it to switch between dexterous manipulation and locomotion. One of the coolest robot designs I’ve seen. handroid.org/#abstract

i turned the entire actual city of san francisco into a video game! with apple maps data, i made it so you can climb buildings, 'steal' cars, and explore anywhere. and you can play it!!

A super smart scientist asked me last week: what's so hard about reshoring general advanced manufacturing (short of TSMC frontier precision chemistry)? Isn't the issue just labor cost? Nope. A toy example to illustrate: We're trying to build a lot of drone motors in America right now, and falling short. It's not a labor cost issue. The work instruction says: this magnet, this adhesive, cure at this temperature, wipe the rotor first. Any competent team can build the station and follow it. But in week 3, motors start failing vibration testing. Some of them, mostly night shift. Also, weirdly, whenever the careful new hire is on station. The adhesive cures differently with humidity, and the dehumidifier cycles differently at night. The new hire wipes the rotor generously, and that leaves a solvent film the adhesive doesn't like very much. Someone who has run a motor line before can figure this out in 10m. Everyone else -- struggle city. The "fix" is two lines in the work instructions: run the dehumidifier continuously, one solvent wipe per rotor. But those lines aren't in the work instruction, and they're not in anyone's! At best the fix becomes a corrective-action report in one line's files, linked to nothing and never read. A motor line rapidly may go from 5 to 40 stations, each with a dozen of these painful stories on the weekly as it grows. "What Shenzhen knows" is not written down in a book whose covers can be sliced off and ingested into a model, it's a few million humidity stories stored in people, and a pace of knowledge-rich adjustment that keeps cost down and yield high. The only way to get it back is work with people who have brought up lines, to reshore and grow the ecosystem of people who have this knowledge, and to capture that knowledge as we build. Lots of people have clever ideas about the data capture/API piece, but we think the business of manufacturing may need equal portions pain tolerance, customer commitment, and cleverness on talent. America needs to solve the other half of reshoring.

We (unironically) need a reliable domestic supply of rhesus macaques for biomedical research as much as we ought to invest in domestic semis. China is the biggest source of global supply, they effectively aren't exporting them, and they don't have enough for domestic demand anyway. Yes it will be interesting if there are ways to reduce animal testing in the future but for the time being this is a very real problem for the US.

The first "structural stone buildings" you'll see in the US will be regular buildings with self-supporting stone facades (not bearing the building's load). That's the easier/faster code path than making entire structures, slabs and cores out of stone. These building will be similar in form to Soho's cast iron buildings, with columns and beams forming a separate layer in front of the main building. Reinforced stone columns and girders could be a lot thinner than the cast iron versions and require far fewer columns, though we'll hopefully have a ton of column anyway.

This one page changed my life. 42 years ago today, it convinced my parents I shouldn't go back to college. I started by upgrading PCs from a dorm room. Today @Dell is helping build the infrastructure that powers AI, from the edge to some of the world's largest AI factories. You never know which small decision will change everything. Keep building🚀🙏 #PlayNiceButWin

Now that I’m out of government, I can finally respond for myself: Get bent, soyboy. We didn’t do this for “Silicon Valley . . . companies.” We did this for you, for your family, your community, your state, your nation, and your species. Nuclear energy provides the safest, highest density, reliable power available on our planet. My career colleagues at DOE and NRC inspired me to think about nuclear as a way to forge American steel and electrolyze aluminum without releasing particulate matter, to desalinate water in the Middle East and save humanity from resource wars. By rejecting the false narratives and Cold War hysteria, we can secure the next American century while raising whole countries out of poverty. Do you really think I left an incredible career at Kirkland, paid out of pocket for an apartment in DC and dozens of cross-country trips, and left my family on the west coast because I wanted to enrich people I never met before taking this job? I came to D.C. to do something that mattered, to satisfy a driving curiosity (more on that later), and, most importantly, to serve. As I learned more about nuclear energy and its history, I developed a conviction that one nuclear’s biggest issues was a culture of cynicism: nothing new or exciting could happen because it would end in disappointment, and that militated against rocking the boat even a tiny bit. The career staff in government and their industry counterparts lived through dark winters before and stopped believing that warm springs could bloom into summers. I have two core philosophies. First, I believe in ruthless optimism. Rational decision making requires detached risk analysis. But we also cannot win if we believe we can lose. Merging the two requires orienting teams around driving missions. That way, when a real opportunity presents itself, you can take a huge swing. If I take credit for anything—honestly, almost all of the success belongs to the incredible and dedicated people at @ENERGY and @NRCgov—it’s countering the cultural rot and morass that risked forfeiting American excellence. My colleagues and I gave cover to the scientists and engineers, which freed them up to focus on delivering safe power. And, as success materialized, they started to dream again. That’s why the pilot program succeeded, and why I feel confident about the future of NLICs and NRC reform. Nobody needs me anymore because they can innovate on their own. My second core philosophy is to assume positive intent. Avi, I know that you heard about my real motivations from multiple people you interviewed when preparing your hit piece on me. Rather than telling that story, one which could help inspire another generation of people to use their talents for the greater good, you ignored them. Instead, you implied that Peter Thiel recruited me for nefarious purposes. (I’ve never met him, but, @peterthiel, if you’re reading this, I’m a huge fan!) Nuclear regulation starts and ends with safety. I promised everyone I worked with that I would resign before doing or pushing for anything that could compromise public safety. But I also distinguished between real safety and performative bullshit. That’s what the careers came to embrace, too. We love nuclear, why would we do anything that could risk threatening its future? America faces a crossroads. We can either trod a road of cultural decay or hike our way back to the peak of global innovation. Join me on the latter path. Correct the fear mongering and conspiracies and tell the story of America’s great reindustrialization. Tell the story of our public servants, our great entrepreneurs, our scientific dominance. Tell the real story about how DOGE went nuclear.

It’s with profound sadness that I read ambassador Chad Freeman’s 2021 address about the Sino-American split. The dynamic he so accurately laid out in 2021 about how all the global players will act played out as he predicted to a T, with no one except perhaps China acting with an ounce more wisdom than he feared. (China, I think it’s fair to say, has distanced itself from Wolf Warrior diplomacy since 2021, but it still has not taken the responsibility of being a better global leader.) open.substack.com/pub/chasfr…