Clinging On to an Industrial Policy Punch
This week: EI's mission, super steels, rebuilding American manufacturing, maturity of 60+ digital industrial technologies, DTCS, Onshape's Model Based Definition, i3X, building the next-gen power grid
Shop Talk
Capturing this week’s zeitgeist
For those long-time subscribers (some 5+ years!) and new subscribers, I want to take a moment and reinforce the mission of Exponential Industry.
Exponential Industry seeks to be the highest quality mixed media newsletter for the business of high-tech manufacturing, energy, and supply chain. We seek to build a community across engineers, managers, and capitalists innovating within physical AI, additive manufacturing (3D Printing), cyber-physical systems (CPS), industrial automation, energy systems, and materials science.
Our Tenets
Direct from the source - We bias to primary sources by synthesizing thousands of company blogs, press releases, podcasts, deep-dive articles, tweets, and videos directly from where they are originally published.
Credit and attribution - We prominently display the author(s) and publication to give credit where credit is due.
Straight to the point - Our excerpts seek to answer what and why. We want to highlight the value proposition and result so each reader is briefed on a wide range of topics and is encouraged to dive deeper if the content is enticing to explore more.
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My ask to you: Keep clicking on the content within the weekly digests to give insight on which media you find valuable to ensure our content continues to hit the mark.
New in 2026: We are gifting a 1-year paid subscription to the first person to identify the content link AND cultural reference to the title/subject line of this week’s digest. Comment on this post with your guess before next week’s digest is released to be eligible!
Last week’s answer: Sweeping Innovation Bothers Industrial Incumbents paralleled the "broomgate" scandal in Olympic curling, where high-tech directional brooms disrupted the sport by allowing players to steer stones regardless of the initial throw, with the way digital manufacturers like Fuyao bothered glass manufacturing incumbents in the USA.
Assembly Line
This week’s Industry 5.0 breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.
⚓🏭 How Super Steels Are Made
⚓🏭 Hertha Metals is scaling up a new steel production system powered by natural gas and electricity. The process, which can also run on hydrogen, uses a continuous electric arc furnace within which iron ore of any grade and format is reduced and carburized into molten steel in a single step /MIT News/.
🏭🇺🇸 Rebuilding the Middle of American Manufacturing
A conversation with Saman Farid, CEO of Formic, on supply chain density, utilization and reliable execution in robotics.
🏭🇺🇸 The mindset shift to rebuild American factories /a16z/ from Erin Price-Wright at the 2026 Tauber Global Operations Conference
🏭🇺🇸💱 Build American, Sell Worldwide: How A Depression-Era Agency Is Funding America’s New Industrial Core /Adam Rossi on X/. The Export-Import Bank of the United States — EXIM — authorized $185 million for their new factory, a 270,000 sq ft complete production megaplant in Texas.
⏭️ 60+ Emerging Digital Industrial Technologies
IoT Analytics identified 64 industrial digital technologies that those working in industrial operations should have on their radar: 21 in AI & ML, 18 in automation & robotics, 13 in IoT hardware & connectivity, and 12 in cloud, software, & security.
Of the 64 technologies on the radar, 18 are considered to be fairly mature. Many technologies are further out and still need time to reach mass-market maturity.
Read more at IoT Analytics
Circuit Raises $30M to Bring Purpose-Built AI Into Manufacturing and Service Operations /PR Newswire/
⚗️🧠 How an AI-Powered ‘Digital Twin’ Accelerates Chemistry and Materials Discoveries
The new platform, called “Digital Twin for Chemical Science” (DTCS), allows researchers to observe chemical reactions, adjust experimental parameters, and validate hypotheses simultaneously during a single experiment. Traditional approaches require researchers to first develop a hypothesis, and then design an experiment to collect data and develop theoretical models to analyze that data before they can finally conduct follow-up experiments to validate the model.
The advance is a significant step toward autonomous chemical characterization, where AI-guided experiments could accelerate the timeline for discovering and characterizing new materials and chemical processes for useful applications.
Read more at Berkeley Lab
⚗️🇺🇸 212 NexT invests in advanced chemistry startup Aepnus /Tech EU/
New Product Introduction
Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services
📐 What’s New in Onshape 1.211 (February 20, 2026)
This update marks a major milestone with the introduction of Model Based Definition, enabling an entirely new approach to communicating manufacturing intent directly within your 3D models. Alongside MBD, you’ll find a host of CAD improvements that streamline your design workflow, and the AI Advisor is now built into Onshape’s help system to get you answers faster than ever.
Read more at Onshape
Sprout was designed in Onshape from the start. /Fauna Robotics on X/
🛻 Ford’s Coming New $30K Electric Pickup Is the Start Of Something Much Bigger
✍️ Author: Alisa Priddle
The key to the project has been an internal skunkworks team that started with a blank slate, throwing out traditional notions of how to design and engineer a vehicle. It’s a group that grew from a single employee to about 450 in Long Beach, California, supported by another 200 at the company’s Silicon Valley facility in Palo Alto.
The biggest headliner has been the development of Ford’s all-new Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) platform, which will underpin everything from small, subcompact vehicles on up. According to Ford, the platform reduces parts by about 20 percent compared with a typical Ford program, requiring 25 percent fewer fasteners and 40 percent fewer workstations in the Louisville, Kentucky, plant that most recently assembled the Ford Escape. The plant is being retooled to bring in the entirely new production system.
Read more at MotorTrend and Ford From the Road
🛻🔌 Why EV-Makers Are Suddenly Obsessed With Wires /Heatmap/
🖨️🔌 3D-printing platform rapidly produces complex electric machines /MIT News/. Overcoming challenges of 3D printing with multiple functional materials, MIT researchers fabricated an electric linear motor in hours.
🏭📊 Announcement of i3X at ProveIt! 2026
The Industrial Information Interoperability Exchange (i3X) is an open, common API initiative proposed to address a growing interoperability challenge in modern manufacturing architectures: manufacturing data silo proliferation and API chaos. As manufacturers adopt heterogeneous software stacks from multiple vendors, the industry risks repeating past fragmentation seen with protocols, stovepipe architectures, and namespaces—this time at the API layer.
Read more at CESMII
SUSE Acquires Losant to Modernize Industrial IoT with a Full-Stack Open Process Automation Platform at the Edge /SUSE/. For example, a manufacturer can collect real-time sensor data from production equipment, orchestrate it at the Edge, and automatically trigger maintenance workflows or AI-driven quality checks before defects or failures occur. This reduces the complexity traditionally associated with Industrial IoT adoption and accelerates the path from data collection to actionable insight.
Business Transactions
This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.
🏭💵 A Primer on Factory Economics for Startups /Oliver Hsu on X/
⚡🇺🇸 Heron Power Raises $140 Million to Build a Next-Generation Power Grid in Series B
Heron Power, an energy infrastructure company, announced the closing of $140 million in Series B financing co-led by Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) American Dynamism Fund and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, with participation from existing investors Capricorn Investment Group, Energy Impact Partners, Valor Atreides AI Fund, and Gigascale Capital.
With this financing, Heron Power will build a 40-gigawatt, highly automated U.S. manufacturing facility for Heron Link, Heron’s solid state transformer solution for critical energy and AI data center projects. Heron Link streamlines the connection of low voltage DC technologies like solar, batteries, and AI compute to medium voltage AC grids, without the use of bulky, expensive, and long lead time transformers. Leveraging latest generation power semiconductors and a modular architecture, Heron Link eliminates entire tiers of legacy electrical gear for data center, solar, and energy storage projects, increasing speed, efficiency, reliability, and affordability.
Read more at GlobeNewswire
DG Matrix Closes $60 Million Series A to Scale Next-Generation Power Infrastructure for AI and Electrification /Business Wire/
🤝🦾🤖🦿🚙 Agility Robotics Announces Commercial Agreement with Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada
Agility Robotics, creator of the general-purpose robot DigitⓇ, today announced that Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada (TMMC) has signed a commercial agreement with the company. In addition to the work Digit is doing today, Agility and TMMC will continue to assess further use cases where robots and AI could help augment automotive production. The companies will explore how automating some extremely repetitive and physically taxing tasks commonly found on automotive manufacturing production lines could reduce strain and increase safety for employees, freeing them to do more value-added work in the production facility.
Read more at Business Wire
🤝🦾🚢 HII Teams with Path Robotics to Integrate Physical AI into Manned and Unmanned Shipbuilding /HII/
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