From killer drones to robotaxis, sci-fi dreams are coming to life
Hope that their billions, brains and brashness can usher in a new world filled with robot cars, killer drones and solar power. In other words: hard tech.
These sci-fi dreams—made popular by Elon Musk—have been building for some time. But they have become harder to ignore in the past month, with gambits from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey and Daniel Ek.
They're all pouring money into efforts that a few years ago would have seemed like the stuff of science fiction but are now becoming very real. Their collective interest is giving hard tech a moment, not unlike the rush of investment and entrepreneurs to software with the debut of the iPhone and the rise of mobile computing.
The enthusiasm for hard tech is fueled, in large part, by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. It holds the eventual promise of greater autonomy for physical machines and new advances in science.
Today's hard-tech moment, which is intertwined with the AI boom, presents the opportunity to change entrenched industries: defense, transportation, energy production and more. And with that, possibly create new winners.
This past week, for example, Ek, who created his fortune with streaming music service Spotify, turned his attention to drone technology. It's an area that has taken on greater attention after high-profile drone attacks were used by Ukraine in Russia and by Israel in Iran.
Ek's investment firm, Prima Materia, led a 600 million euro fundraising round, equivalent to $691.4 million, for Helsing, a German defense-tech startup developing AI drones. 'There's an enormous realization that it's really now AI, mass and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield," Ek told the Financial Times.
Weeks earlier, the prospect of military application for another avant-garde hardware dream—extended-reality battlefield goggles—reunited Zuckerberg and Luckey, two billionaires who had a public break a few years earlier. Zuckerberg and Luckey's companies, Meta Platforms and defense-tech firm Anduril Industries, respectively, are teaming up to try to win a Pentagon contract for rugged headsets that could help soldiers on the battlefield.
And Musk has said Tesla soon expects to begin public rides in the automaker's robotaxis in Austin, Texas. If the chief executive pulls it off, it could be a huge step in the company's pivot to robotics, which Musk has suggested could lead to humanoid robots outnumbering people.
The imagination is seemingly the only limit amid the cocktail parties in San Francisco these days. Engineers talk giddily about how they see ways AI can aid in developing new lifesaving drugs and creating new materials that might be lighter and stronger for aerospace.
It's a remarkable shift from a couple of years ago, when tech was seen as the problem—taking jobs, spreading hate, ruining the environment.
Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who foresaw software 'eating the world," pushed back against cynicism in a lengthy 2023 essay titled 'The Techno-Optimist Manifesto." He argued that our societies are built on technology, which he called 'the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress and the realization of our potential."
His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, launched an effort, dubbed 'American Dynamism," aimed at investing in founders involved in national interests, including aerospace, defense and manufacturing. The firm is a backer of such companies as Anduril, OpenAI and SpaceX.
The effort comes as a new jingoism has emerged globally amid geopolitical tensions and renewed inward-facing domestic politics. Whether it is Ek investing in a European tech firm building drones for use in Ukraine against Russia or venture capitalist David Sacks leading the Trump administration's efforts to outpace China's AI development, new tech is suddenly the solution.
Hardware, plus the huge cash requirements for complicated manufacturing, has long been seen as more risky for Sand Hill Road venture capitalists eager for a quick return on investment.
In software development, moving fast and breaking things can work. In hardware, things often just break. On Wednesday, SpaceX's Starship spacecraft exploded into a giant fireball during a routine test, one of many setbacks as the company works to develop technology to travel to Mars.
Still, Musk's other successes give entrepreneurs permission to dream big.
This past week, Altman, OpenAI's CEO, was busy talking about his vision for a new personal AI device that could change how we interact with computers.
His comments, made on his brother's podcast, came on the heels of OpenAI's data-center deal in the Middle East. The company also acquired Jony Ive's startup for $6.5 billion, part of an effort that tasks the former Apple design star with overseeing a consumer device to rival the iPhone.
'As OpenAI gets into a place of more resources and more potential, we can just do more things," Altman said. 'I would love to go build the Dyson sphere on the solar system and, like, you know, make the world's gigantic data center with the entire energy output of the sun."Building a Dyson sphere, a hypothetical structure that surrounds a star to capture its energy, might be a couple of decades off, he acknowledged. Still, on Earth, Altman is among those who are investing in ways to better capture solar energy as entrepreneurs look at the incredible demand for electricity in a future where cars, robots and AI data centers are all thirsty for juice.
Hannan Happi's startup Exowatt is working to meet that need. He has seen the change in investor interest in hardware. Roughly a decade ago, he co-founded a drone company that was later sold to defense contractor Sierra Nevada. Then in 2023, he co-founded Exowatt, a solar company that aims to provide energy for AI data centers.
'I think investors this time around are less skittish about hardware aspects of our business," Happi told me. So far, he's raised $90 million.
'Every round we've raised has been oversubscribed," he said. 'We're just about to finish another fundraising event that we didn't even initiate—it just came together—and I think part of that is because we're riding the AI infrastructure wave."
It's a good time to be working on hard things.
Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com
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