Weekly Dose of Optimism #205
Terraform, Billion-Dollar Rounds, Oklo Goes Critical, Astra Math, Terafab + Extra Doses
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome to the 205th Weekly Dose of Optimism!
Yesterday was my daughter Maya’s 4th birthday and we took the kids to the beach to spend time with family and celebrate, so I’m going short on the writeups.
That said… MASSIVE week. Lots to cover, with lots more in the Extras, including cancer-fighting psychedelics? and vertiports?
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Terraform Industries Converts Sunlight Into Hydrogen at $2/kg
I’m not going to do a better job explaining what Terraform pulled off than Casey did, as both CEO and the best hard tech writer on the internet. So read his.
The gist is that Terraform is getting closer to turning sunlight into hydrocarbons cheaply, which would give humanity the power to basically print refined oil, make all sorts of things that require fuel, not just batteries, cheaper and cleaner, and make one of the people I’d most like to see become a multibillionaire a multibillionaire.
(2) Billion Dollar Rounds for Base Power, Hadrian, and Valar
Base Power Company Raises $1B at $13B Post, Launches Base Core
Base is a not boring portfolio company and one of two companies (with Ramp) that I’ve written multiple Deep Dives on. To understand what I think makes the company so special, check out Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, and get ready for Chapter 3 next week.
Hadrian Raises $1.37B at $7.87B Post
“We can’t forget the world of atoms is 100x bigger than the world of bits,” CEO Chris Power told NYSE. Amen.
Hadrian is another not boring portfolio company and favorite, and a company on which I wrote a Deep Dive, way back in April 2022: Hadrian: Ex Machina Ad Lunam. Writing about Hadrian one of the reasons I got so interested in hard tech, and Hadrian’s leadership is one of the reasons so many companies have gotten into the space. Happy to see Chris with $1.37 billion more to build with.
Valar Atomics Raises $1B from Sequoia & $200B in Debt
Valar is, sadly, not a not boring capital portfolio company, but I’ve been a big fan of Isaiah’s since we met in 2023 and he came on Age of Miracles. The guy has been doubted the whole way - you can’t start a nuclear company without a PhD in nuclear physics! - and he continues to prove the doubters wrong.
Valar is going to pump out so many nuclear reactors.
(3) Oklo Goes Critical
Speaking of nuclear… I’m a simple man. A nuclear company goes critical for the first time, it makes the Dose.
Unlike a lot of the newfangled advanced reactor companies, Oklo had to fight through the old NRC regulatory regime to get here, submitting the first-ever custom combined license application for an advanced reactor in March 2020, for a ~1.5 MWe Aurora fast reactor at Idaho National Laboratory, before getting turned down for incompleteness, as Jake shared with us on Age of Miracles.
Congrats Jake and the Oklo team!
(4) ChatGPT Astra Solves 10 Big Math & CS Problems
You’ve likely seen this story, which has caused a lot of people to freak out and update their timelines and claim that we are in the Singularity and that all the charts are up from here, which… maybe! It is very cool that the models can do math problems. Much cooler than doing cybercrimes for sure.
The fun thing is, you might get to play with it yourself as early as next week, if you believe leo, one of the best AI leakers out there. This may be GPT-6 instead of another GPT-5.x.
So prepare yourself. The world will never again be the same after next week, once again.
(5) Tesla Picks Terafab Location
Tesla’s Terafab - “the largest chip manufacturing facility ever, with the goal of producing over 1 terawatt of compute per year” - in Grimes County, Texas. Tesla and SpaceX will invest $16.8 billion for the initial buildout, which is money it might have spent in California if former State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez hadn’t told Elon to go f*ck himself a few years back.
The coolest part of this is a detail that Josh Steinman caught in the video: it looks like they’re building a particle accelerator under Terafab to generate short wavelength photons for the lithography process.
When Extropic’s Beff Jezos (on whom more below), tweeted that it looked like Elon was going to build a free electron laser (FEL) based EUV machine, Elon replied, “FEL FTW.”
One synchotron could provide ultra-bright, clean EUV light to several scanners at once “with way more photons and less mess than today’s tin-plasma sources,” per Phil Beisel.
All of which means that Elon seems to be going after ASML and TSMC at the same time by building a particle accelerator.
Now that’s vertical integration.
Extra Doses: Science Breakthroughs, Ribbit Power Letter, Leopold Post-Mortem, Extropic, Jeff Dean, Atoms x Joby
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