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The Lead
Washington has spent two years paying companies to build chips in America. This week it started buying a piece of them instead.
On Wednesday the Commerce Department signed a $500 million CHIPS Act deal with SandboxAQ, a startup that uses AI to search for new chipmaking materials, and took an equity stake in the company in return. A day earlier it gave Coherent a letter of intent worth up to $50 million to expand a plant in Sherman, Texas that grows indium phosphide, the crystal behind the optical parts that move data between chips inside an AI data center. Neither deal builds a fab. Both fund what surrounds one.
The equity is the real change. The government now sits on the cap table of the firms it backs, with the upside if they win and the loss if they fold, echoing the roughly 10 percent stake it took in Intel last year. And it’s buying in at a telling moment. TSMC told investors this month that its most advanced manufacturing and packaging lines are sold out through 2027, with demand running 25 to 30 percent ahead of supply. When the factory can’t be built any faster, the next dollar moves to what feeds it: the optics that carry the data, the materials that go into the silicon. Washington has started taking equity in the unglamorous layers the market still treats as an afterthought.
Defense & Space
General Atomics and Anduril won the Air Force's first Collaborative Combat Aircraft production awards, at least 150 autonomous fighter drones, with $996.5 million requested in FY27 to start.
KNDS is preparing a roughly €5 billion IPO in Frankfurt and Paris on a record €33.1 billion order backlog, Europe's clearest sign that rearmament is reaching the equity markets.
AST SpaceMobile launched BlueBirds 8, 9, and 10 on a Falcon 9, deploying its largest commercial arrays yet from a Texas factory now past 2,250 workers.
Semiconductors & Electronics
Nokia is investing $30 million to expand its photonic chip-packaging plant in Pennsylvania, raising capacity up to tenfold and adding more than 250 jobs, backed by the Shapiro administration.
Coherent signed a CHIPS letter of intent for up to $50 million to quadruple wafer capacity at its indium-phosphide photonics fab in Sherman, Texas, part of a roughly $650 million expansion adding more than 1,000 jobs.
Intel moved its 18A-P node into risk production, the trial run before volume manufacturing, claiming 9 percent more performance at the same power as it courts an outside foundry customer.
Energy & Materials
BHP and Lundin Mining cleared their $9.7 billion Vicuña copper project into Argentina's RIGI incentive regime, the country's largest mining investment, with capex that could reach $18 billion and 395,000 tonnes of copper a year.
Dominion Energy and Santee Cooper won approval for a $5 billion, 2,180-megawatt gas plant in South Carolina, with regulators rejecting environmental requests for cost caps.
Elevate Renewables energized a 150-MW/600-MWh standalone battery in Rockingham County, Virginia, the largest standalone storage project to date on the PJM grid.
Manufacturing & Automation
Johnson & Johnson committed more than $1 billion to expand Acuvue contact-lens production in Jacksonville, Florida, supporting 3,500 jobs and output of more than 1.7 billion lenses a year.
Lockheed Martin announced 1,200 new jobs at its 8-million-square-foot Marietta, Georgia plant building C-130J and F-35 aircraft, a site it values at $4.5 billion in annual state impact.
Foundation Alloy raised a $22 million Series A to scale solid-state metal production for defense, aerospace, and automotive customers, targeting several tons a week by 2027.
Maritime & Shipbuilding
Congress moved to restrict buying U.S. warships built in foreign yards while backing a multi-year buy of up to 15 destroyers from FY2028 and $1.85 billion in R&D for foreign frigate designs.
Ardmore Shipping exercised options for two more 40,500-dwt product tankers at China's Wuhu Shipyard, expanding the order to four ships, with deliveries from late 2028.
EMS Development won a $9.3 million Navy contract to supply 308 outboard magnetometers for Virginia-class submarines, with work through December 2028.
Supply Chain & Freight
BNSF Railway won local approval for a rail hub of up to $4 billion, a 4,500-acre intermodal gateway in the California desert with room for 60 trains and a decade of West Coast throughput.
Saxum Investment signed a 50-year Port of Tacoma lease to build a $250 million, 574,000-square-foot cold-storage and food-processing complex.
C.H. Robinson launched BidBoardX, matching carriers to committed freight across a network of 450,000 carriers and 75,000 customers moving roughly $23 billion a year.
Dealbook
Olin and Huntsman agreed to a merger of equals creating a $12 billion-plus North American chemicals company, with about $400 million in targeted synergies.
Arcline Investment is buying AstroNova for $272 million at $29 a share in cash, taking private a maker of aerospace and defense identification and marking systems.
ANV Group is acquiring Open Lending for about $223 million at $3.15 a share, a roughly 78 percent premium, taking the auto-lending platform private.
Twenty raised a $100 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, led by Accel, to industrialize offensive cyber tools for the U.S. military.
T1 Energy acquired battery maker Kore Power for roughly $32 million, folding in Kore's U.S. cell-manufacturing assets.
Back Tuesday.
