Tech Billionaires Wanted to Build a New California City. They're Settling for an Industrial Park, Instead

Gizmodo

6 days ago

In 2023, the California Forever group, a company backed by a gaggle of Bay Area billionaires, announced that it wanted to use some 60,000 acres of Solano County farmland north of San Francisco to develop a brand new city. The effort was pretty much an unmitigated disaster from start to finish, and the group eventually rescinded its plans. Now, however, the same group says that it has a new project that may be significantly easier to accomplish.
In a blog post made to its website last week, the California Forever group unveiled a new proposal for what it calls 'the Solano Foundry'—a planned industrial park, centered around a large manufacturing plant, that the group describes as a 'new home for frontier tech, an hour north of Silicon Valley.' The 'Foundry' would be quite large, residing on 2,100 acres and covering some 40 million square feet, the group says. The industrial hub could act as a hub for 'advanced transportation, robotics, energy, and defense,' the site says. You can see the plans for the project here.
'Silicon Valley earned its name because chips were once made here alongside code,' said Jan Sramek, Founder & CEO of California Forever. 'The Solano Foundry restores that formula. By bringing R&D and manufacturing back together, we'll outpace global competitors, streamline supply chains, and ignite a new era where products are both designed and made in California.'
The Foundry seems to gel well with President Donald Trump's espoused desire to see manufacturing return stateside, which tracks since many prominent Silicon Valley billionaires (including folks like Marc Andreessen, a backer of the California Forever project) have voiced their support for Trump and his industrial agenda. At the same time, Silicon Valley's renewed alliance with the defense industry means that our tech overlords are increasingly looking for ways to produce weapons and other defense technologies. Relevantly, the proposal for the Foundry specifically mentions defense, noting that it will serve as a location for 'defense start‑ups' and will help America's 'innovators' to 'iterate at a pace that outperforms our adversaries.' The Foundry's settlement would also sit adjacent to a local Air Force base, which the group says would offer 'significant opportunities for collaboration with our military.'
The Foundry also represents a significant reduction of the group's original ambitions, which were considerably more quixotic. To be sure, the proposal still represents a huge undertaking, although not nearly as huge as the new metropolis that California Forever's backers originally envisioned. The effort to create a new city ran into obstacles at every turn. A lawsuit between the group and local farmers who did not want to sell their land to the development spurred regional animosity and contributed to the perception that the project was run by rich bullies who wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. Not long afterward, a series of informational town halls designed to sell county residents on the plan devolved into chaos, as locals protested the proposal. Finally, a proposed ballot initiative that would have given the project a legal pathway towards development floundered and had to be pulled due to a lack of public support.
It's probably just as well. Sober fiscal analysis of the proposed plan made it sound certifiably insane. Indeed, an impact report produced by the Solano County's Board of Supervisors in 2024 claimed that the project would put a huge financial burden on local taxpayers, saddling them with $6.4 billion during the project's initial phase of development and, eventually, would force them to pay out as much as $50 billion before the city was completed. The project would also inevitably lead to a surge in local traffic, and might not even be 'financially feasible' in the long run, the report projected. It's unclear whether the group's new project is any more feasible than its last one.