Today we're announcing $75M to build Solcoa One, our 500-tonne rare earth metallization plant in Nevada. At Solcoa, we believe rare earths are the foundation of America's next great industrial era. An era we intend to win on the merits, with superior American technology.

Early takeaways from Austin Deep Tech Week: 1. Austin is a serious f*cking city. SF is still the center of gravity. LA has built an absolute monster around aerospace, defense and industrials. But after spending a few days in Austin, I'm increasingly convinced this city has structural advantages that the coasts underestimate. People I've met here seem to have one primary objective: Build. Heads down. Gas pedal pinned to the floor. Noticeably less obsession with looking important and more obsession with actually making shit work. Deep tech rewards exactly that mentality. 2. Texas being aggressively pro-business isn't some Twitter talking point. It's an actual competitive advantage. Heard versions of this repeatedly from founders and investors this week. Permitting. Regulation. Taxes. Energy. Land. Manufacturing. Expansion. When you're building software, you can abstract yourself away from geography. When you're building atoms, geography becomes part of your cap table. Every additional month waiting on a facility, permit, power connection or expansion is effectively dilution. Texas understand that speed matters. 3. The coastal migration isn't over. SF and LA still have unbelievable technical talent density, particularly at the earliest stages. But the requirements change when a deep tech company starts working. Now you need 100,000 square feet. Power. Testing. Manufacturing. Suppliers. Technicians. Hundreds of employees. Suddenly Texas starts looking a hell of a lot more attractive. And founders here don't seem nearly as worried about convincing talent to follow them as outsiders assume. 4. The next chapter isn't companies moving to Texas. It's companies starting here. Historically the playbook has often been: Coast → prove technology → raise capital → expand into Texas. I think that increasingly becomes: Texas → Texas → Texas. More technical founders will move here before starting the company. More pre-seed and seed companies will originate here. More headquarters will be planted here from Day 1. And that's when the flywheel gets interesting: Talent → startups → capital → exits → experienced operators → new startups. Once that loop starts compounding, ecosystems become very difficult to stop. 5. Austin feels significantly less distracted. There is obviously bullshit everywhere. Startups attract grift like flies to shit. But there's noticeably less keeping-up-with-the-Joneses energy here. Less worrying about who raised what round. Less optimizing for appearances. Less obsession with which VC follows you or which dinner you got invited to. More: Does the thing actually work? That cultural difference matters more than people realize. 6. “But the capital is on the coasts” is becoming a lazy argument. Have you ever heard of a f*cking airplane? It's 2026. If you're building a generational company in Austin and a great investor in SF wants into the round, they're getting on the plane. Great companies don't travel to capital. Capital travels to great companies. Austin already has serious institutional capital on the ground alongside a growing ecosystem of smaller funds. More capital will follow the companies. It always does. 7. Austin increasingly looks built for where deep tech is going, not where venture has been. Deep tech is becoming less about a handful of scientists sitting in a Bay Area lab and increasingly about deploying massive amounts of physical infrastructure. Factories. Energy. Robotics. Defense. Space. Advanced manufacturing. Data centers. Industrial systems. Those businesses eventually collide with the physical world. And the physical world cares about land, power, regulation, labor, logistics and speed. Texas has a lot of all six. SF still has the deepest venture ecosystem. LA has built an extraordinary deep tech machine. But Austin doesn't need to become either of them. It may be building something fundamentally different: A startup ecosystem optimized not just for inventing hard technology — but for actually industrializing it. That's a much more interesting proposition. Came into Austin Deep Tech Week thinking this was an important emerging hard tech ecosystem. Now thinking “emerging” might already be outdated. Ingredients are here. Talent is coming. Capital will follow. Unlike a lot of startup ecosystems I've visited, Austin feels like it actually wants you to build shit here. That's a hell of a tailwind 🏭🇺🇸 Finally - mad props @Andercot, @CaitlinCloud9, @Jason_A_Scharf + many others for putting this together & making this a kickass week!

Really excited to be teaming up with @M31Capital for another headline Deep Tech Week event - Physics of Consciousness This is a real tour de force - talks by @MaxDerakhshani @StuartHameroff Garret Moddel, Thomas Brophy, and of course @Jason_Jorjani

I'm looking forward to presenting at this "Physics of Consciousness" Deep Tech Week event on Friday (9/25), in Austin TX, and to the Q&A with the other panelists. deep-tech-week.com/austin-20…

Austin Deep Tech Week is officially underway! @Andercot

For decades there have been two defining hallmarks of a world power - Nuclear Energy, and a Space Program. These demand the complete tech stack, there's no shortcuts, no compromise. Few nations in history have achieved both. In that sense, Texas today is doing what many have tried - building a spacefaring industrial civilization - and it is unique in the United States. It's own electrical grid. Permission to build. Nowhere in the US can you build faster, move faster, with more freedom, and it shows - housing is getting cheaper, people are moving to Texas, and it is the new home of an increasing number of hardware companies, not just in nuclear, and space, but biotech, neurotech, manufacturing, robotics, housing, defense, and computing. It will be clear that in hindsight not all cultures, not all civilizations can do this - that producing the entire techno-industrial stack, from primary energy production, mining and refining, forging and casting, all the way to heavy-lift orbital rockets, next-generation computing, satellites, robotics - this is rare. It is not every culture that produces a spacefaring civilization, but one that we know for sure that can do it is the United States, and nowhere is more of that culture of industrial enterprise, innovation, and risk-taking embodied then the state of Texas. So for all those reasons @deeptechweek is going to Austin, starting next week, with 25 events and 2,000 people signed up, and talks spanning defense, energy, construction, biotech, 12 factory tours, receptions and happy hours every day, talks by @StuartHameroff on the Physics of Consciousness, and of course, a closing party at @AaloAtomics nuclear reactor factory, because hell yeah. Thank you to @DeveloperHarris and @americanhousing for hosting our kickoff hardware showcase, @CaitlinCloud9 and @Jason_A_Scharf and @JackRuhl helping cofound Austin DTW and making it happen. Aspera Ad Astra

For decades there have been two defining hallmarks of a world power - Nuclear Energy, and a Space Program. These demand the complete tech stack, there's no shortcuts, no compromise. Few nations in history have achieved both. In that sense, Texas today is doing what many have tried - building a spacefaring industrial civilization - and it is unique in the United States. It's own electrical grid. Permission to build. Nowhere in the US can you build faster, move faster, with more freedom, and it shows - housing is getting cheaper, people are moving to Texas, and it is the new home of an increasing number of hardware companies, not just in nuclear, and space, but biotech, neurotech, manufacturing, robotics, housing, defense, and computing. It will be clear that in hindsight not all cultures, not all civilizations can do this - that producing the entire techno-industrial stack, from primary energy production, mining and refining, forging and casting, all the way to heavy-lift orbital rockets, next-generation computing, satellites, robotics - this is rare. It is not every culture that produces a spacefaring civilization, but one that we know for sure that can do it is the United States, and nowhere is more of that culture of industrial enterprise, innovation, and risk-taking embodied then the state of Texas. So for all those reasons @deeptechweek is going to Austin, starting next week, with 25 events and 2,000 people signed up, and talks spanning defense, energy, construction, biotech, 12 factory tours, receptions and happy hours every day, talks by @StuartHameroff on the Physics of Consciousness, and of course, a closing party at @AaloAtomics nuclear reactor factory, because hell yeah. Thank you to @DeveloperHarris and @americanhousing for hosting our kickoff hardware showcase, @CaitlinCloud9 and @Jason_A_Scharf and @JackRuhl helping cofound Austin DTW and making it happen. Aspera Ad Astra