L3Harris gets $876.4M Navy modification for Growler jammer work — The modification covers Next Generation Jammer Low Band production through FY2031, continuing L3Harris's central role in the EA-18G electronic-attack program as the Navy moves from development toward fielding. (Washington Technology)

OCCAR awards €3.7B ($4.2B) contract for two Italian DDX destroyers — The Fincantieri/Leonardo OSN joint venture takes the prime, with deliveries planned for 2033 and 2035 — well behind Rome's original 2028 timeline, a reminder that European naval programs run on their own clock. (Breaking Defense)

Hanwha Defense to establish $2.2B manufacturing campus in Arkansas — Hanwha’s U.S. subsidiary plans a $2.2 billion campus at Pine Bluff Arsenal to produce propellant charges for 155mm artillery and base-bleed units. It is another example of foreign industrial capacity being pulled directly into the U.S. munitions bottleneck. (Manufacturing Dive)

Navy shipyard modernization has gone from a $21B repair program to a $200B-plus, 50-year industrial project — GAO says the rebuild of Norfolk, Pearl Harbor, Portsmouth and Puget Sound lacks consistent cost, risk and performance reviews. The riff is bigger than cost overruns: keeping nuclear ships operational is becoming a permanent construction-and-maintenance megaproject in its own right. National Defense Magazine (National Defense)

New A321neo quality defect hits more than 500 aircraft — Airbus found insufficient corrosion protection applied by a Tier 2 supplier, affecting roughly 250 aircraft still inside the production system plus delivered jets. It is not considered a safety issue, but rework adds another manufacturing constraint while Airbus tries to push A320-family production toward 75 aircraft per month. (The Air Current)

Castelion moves Blackbeard hypersonic weapon into production — A U.S. Navy order worth up to $200 million moves Blackbeard from development into actual production, another example of newer defense manufacturers crossing the uncomfortable gap between prototype and repeatable manufacturing. (NAIA)

Caterpillar Q2 sales hit $20.5B, up 24%; Deere construction/forestry at $3.6B, up 18% — ENR reports new-equipment sales outperformed used, a useful read on where dealer and fleet demand actually sits. (ENR)

Komatsu opened a 135,000-square-foot parts DC in Edmonton — Doubling its prior Canadian warehouse capacity and enabling 24-hour delivery to dealers across much of Western Canada. The aftermarket bet: mining and construction fleets keep growing, and the parts tail keeps paying. (North American Mining

Robotics investments reached $4.9B in August — The Robot Report counted 162 financing rounds during the month. Capital is still pouring into robotics even as the economically useful near-term opportunity increasingly looks like industrial automation rather than sci-fi household humanoids. (Robot Report)

Qualcomm to acquire PickNik Robotics while keeping MoveIt open-source — Qualcomm plans to combine its Dragonwing and Arduino platforms with the MoveIt manipulation framework. That pushes another major semiconductor company farther up the robotics stack. (Robot Report)

John Deere brings back 375 workers ahead of UAW negotiations — Deere is recalling 150 workers to Seeding and Cylinder Operations in Moline and ~225 to Harvester Works in East Moline. The callback is the first hard capacity signal backing CEO John May's claim that 2026 "marks the bottom of the large ag cycle." (Steel Market Update)

3D-printing demand is turning PLA into a real materials market — Hisun Biomaterials' first-half profit rose 771.9%, PLA sales for 3D printing jumped 169%, and 3D printing went from roughly 30% to 49% of company revenue. Hisun sold about 40,000 tons of PLA during a period when global 3D-printing PLA demand was roughly 70,000 tons. (3D Printing Journal)

Atomic Eagle secures Niger uranium mining convention — The agreement covers the Madaouela uranium project and advances a potential future source of nuclear fuel in one of the world’s established uranium regions. (MiningNews) (Notes)

Glencore signs $1 billion critical-minerals offtake with Nth Cycle — Nth Cycle will supply lithium and other recycled battery materials under a major agreement signed ahead of its planned public listing. This is the processing layer of the minerals problem getting real commercial contracts rather than another slide deck about reshoring. (MiningNews)

Peninsula warns of a write-down at its Lance uranium operation — Legacy production areas at the troubled uranium project are expected to be impaired. Worth tracking against the much broader uranium bull narrative because operational reality is still separating individual assets from the commodity thesis. (MiningNews)

Rare earths remain central to U.S.-China negotiations — Supply of the materials was among the issues discussed around this week's U.S.-China meetings, reinforcing that rare-earth processing and magnets have become negotiating leverage rather than simply another commodity market. Reuters (Reuters)

Win Metals files final permits for the Radio gold-mine restart — The remaining permitting package has been lodged for the Western Australian operation, moving another previously producing asset closer to restart. (MiningNews)

Amazon launches direct Los Angeles-to-East Coast rail service — Amazon’s new Standard Ocean Express product moves imported inventory from Southern California across the country by rail, with the company pitching it as faster than existing alternatives. Amazon continuing to internalize more of the middle mile is worth watching not just as an e-commerce story, but as another large shipper actively redesigning freight networks around rail. (SCD)

Old Dominion raises general rates 4.9% — The increase takes effect October 5 across selected services. It is another useful datapoint on where high-quality LTL carriers believe pricing power sits as freight conditions begin firming. (SCD)

Oregon rolls out PrePass weigh-station bypass technology — Approved carriers can spend less time stopping at weigh stations as Oregon integrates PrePass into its system. Tiny operational changes like this matter at fleet scale because minutes removed from non-revenue activity compound across thousands of loads. (Trucking Dive)

U.S. weekly rail carloads rose 2.4% year over year to 234,207 while intermodal units climbed 6.9% to 301,456. That is a clean little real-economy pulse showing intermodal materially outgrowing traditional carload traffic right now. Logistics Management (Logistics Management) (Bits)

Piston raises $15M to expand cardless fuel payments — Piston says payment volume grew 8x and its merchant network 40x over the past year, with more than 2,000 stations now covered. The company is attacking fleet fraud by removing the physical card rather than layering more detection software onto it. (FreightWaves)

FedEx is taking U.S. shipping rates up 5.9% — Standard rates rise January 4 alongside higher surcharges, extending the pressure on shippers already eating higher fuel and transportation costs. The actual hit will vary by service, weight and distance. (Supply Chain Dive)

Landstar buys 2,000 trailers as maintenance costs climb — Landstar is replacing aging equipment after trailer maintenance costs increased in both 2025 and 2026. There is a useful replacement-cycle read-through here: when maintaining old iron becomes expensive enough, fleets eventually have to spend even without a roaring freight market. (Trucking Dive)

Roehl Transport to boost driver pay by up to 11% — Roehl says some driver pay will rise as much as 11%. Worth watching beside freight-rate data because improving driver compensation can be an early clue that carrier economics and labor demand are tightening again. (Trucking Dive)

U.S. battery-storage installations hit a record 18.9 GWh in Q2 — Energy installations increased 17% year over year even as installed power capacity fell 7%, while average duration rose from 2.8 to 3.5 hours. The mix is shifting toward longer-duration systems designed to provide actual resource adequacy rather than simply short bursts of power. (T&D World)

Summer 2026 exposed where the U.S. grid is running hottest — Data-center load and high temperatures are increasingly colliding with constrained transmission, demand-management limitations and generation integration problems. The electricity bottleneck is moving from an abstract future issue into a regional siting and reliability constraint. (T&D World)

Schneider Electric is buying Cognite for $3.1B — Cognite passed $170M of revenue in 2025 and will join AVEVA, adding industrial data contextualization and AI tooling alongside Schneider’s existing software stack. Schneider increasingly looks less like an electrical-equipment company that happens to own software and more like an industrial operating-system rollup sitting on top of the physical installed base. (TFM)

Load growth is running into worn-out electrical equipment — Integrated Power Services CEO John Zeleger says years of underinvestment in maintenance are colliding with rapidly rising power demand. The grid bottleneck is increasingly not just how much generation can be built, but how many transformers, motors and other installed assets can survive the workload. (Riffs)

$1B grid project aims to power Nevada's next wave of growth — GridLiance West, a NextEra Energy Transmission subsidiary, broke ground September 8 on about 155 miles of 230 kV and 500 kV lines across Clark and Nye counties, a ~$1 billion project targeted to serve in 2028 with capacity for roughly 750,000 homes. Valley Electric Association will operate the upgraded system; NextEra projects 500 construction jobs and $553 million in annual economic impact. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)

ABB and Rolls-Royce SMR sign agreement on nuclear small modular reactor collaboration — ABB signed a September 9 MOU with Rolls-Royce SMR to explore how its automation, electrification, and instrumentation offerings can scale the factory-built 470 MW SMR fleet program. Rolls-Royce SMR has begun site-specific design work for three UK units in North Wales and is advancing deployments in the Czech Republic and Sweden. (Process and Control Today)

US and Turkey signed an SMR technical-assistance agreement — USTDA will fund a year-long study creating the regulatory and financial roadmap for private-sector SMR deployment in Turkey, which targets 5,000 MWe of SMR capacity by 2050. Early entry point for US vendors; the question is who commits to buying the electricity. (World Nuclear News)

Commercial building operations contributed $610B to the U.S. economy last year — BOMA’s estimate includes the downstream economic activity created by operating commercial properties. It is a nice numerical reminder that maintaining buildings is its own enormous Backbone industry, not an afterthought to construction. (Facilities Dive)  

Construction groundbreakings tumbled 25% in August, megaproject starts slowed — Total construction starts fell 24.8% month over month in August to a $1.34 trillion seasonally adjusted annual rate, giving back much of July's data-center- and manufacturing-driven surge, per Dodge Construction Network data released September 21. Nonresidential starts dropped 32%, with manufacturing construction down 80.8% and office/data-center groundbreaking down 31.3%, while healthcare starts jumped 96.1%; year-to-date activity still outpaces 2025. (Construction Dive)

Pennsylvania commercial construction intelligence report for week ending September 18, 2026 — Aligned Data Centers broke ground September 10 on Project Phoenix, a planned 2-GW, three-building data-center campus on the former Bruce Mansfield coal-plant site in Shippingport, PA, expected to support about 3,000 construction jobs and an estimated $10 billion in regional investment, with dedicated onsite power and closed-loop zero-water cooling. Separately, Pennsylvania announced $32 million in federal funding for public EV charging infrastructure in eastern PA. (Building Pennsylvania)

ABC backlog rebounded to 8.5 months — Roughly one in six contractor members is doing data-center work, per the August survey. (CTASC)

Eli Lilly breaks ground on $6.5B Houston manufacturing plant — Lilly has started construction on a $6.5 billion Houston manufacturing project with Bechtel supporting the build. Pharma reshoring continues to create enormous individual projects for contractors and specialized industrial suppliers. (Construction Dive)

Buildots raises $130M to turn jobsite footage into construction intelligence — The company builds digital twins from site imagery for contractors including JE Dunn, Mortenson and Hochtief. Construction software gets much more interesting when it is measuring physical progress rather than simply digitizing paperwork. (TFM)

Kikkoman is spending $560M on new U.S. soy-sauce production — The Japanese manufacturer is adding domestic capacity as American demand for international flavors keeps expanding. It is another very literal example of foreign manufacturers responding to U.S. consumption by putting more plant and equipment inside the country. (Food Dive)

Wendy’s is fighting for control of 314 restaurants in the Meritage bankruptcy — Wendy’s argues the franchisee cannot simply continue operating the units and wants the restaurants transferred either to itself or other operators. Large franchise failures are useful stress tests for who actually controls the physical network when the financial structure breaks. (NRN)

Good Culture hires a COO specifically to scale supply chain — Kirk Jensen is joining the fast-growing cottage-cheese company to improve availability and speed to shelf. The operational layer behind a hot consumer brand usually becomes visible right when growth begins stressing the system. (Food Dive)

McDonald’s is committing $8.5B to its “Next” strategy — The money runs through 2036 and covers restaurant modernization, technology deployment, operational improvements, training and food upgrades. Strip away the branding and this is a giant installed-base capex program across one of the largest physical retail networks on earth. (Restaurant Dive) (Riffs)

Convenience stores are pushing harder into foodservice — CSP’s Outlook Leadership material argues c-stores should compete for QSR occasions without trying to become QSRs, using convenience and multi-mission trips as the differentiation. The line between fuel retail, food distribution and restaurants keeps getting blurrier. (CSP)

Sysco launches $500M AI efficiency program — Sysco announced a $500 million AI-powered efficiency program targeting supply-chain productivity and automation across merchandising and procurement, incorporating $100 million of improvements already announced. The distributor reaffirmed 9–11% adjusted EPS growth guidance for fiscal 2027 and now targets the same growth rate for fiscal 2028 and 2029, up from a prior 6–8% forecast. (Dow Jones)

The hidden costs quietly impacting neighborhood restaurants and their growth — Independent restaurants describe delivery marketplace commissions of up to 30% as a "quiet tax," with an example of 12 orders/day at a $35 ticket on 25% commission costing roughly $3,150/month before advertising and refunds — a second rent payment that scales with success. (IBT)

Aldi lowers fall food prices despite cost pressures ahead — Aldi is lowering seasonal prices even as retailers warn that inflationary pressure may return. The discount grocer keeps forcing the rest of food retail to compete against an operator whose core product is basically procurement efficiency. (FoodNavigator

Yard House becomes Darden's third billion-dollar brand — Yard House has crossed $1 billion in annual sales, joining Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse in Darden's billion-dollar club. It gives Darden another scaled concept underneath what is becoming a surprisingly deep restaurant portfolio. (Restaurant Dive)

Casual dining is having a much stronger 2026 than much of fast food, with BJ's reporting an 8.3% traffic increase and LongHorn Steakhouse up 4.2% in the data highlighted by Barron's. Consumers appear to be distinguishing between cheap and good value, which may explain why some full-service concepts can gain traffic while lower-ticket chains struggle. (Barron's)

Construction groundbreakings fell 25% in August — Megaproject starts slowed sharply during the month, although total activity through August remains ahead of the same point last year. That split matters: the headline slowdown is real, but it has not yet erased the broader 2026 construction expansion. (Construction Dive)

NYC nearly doubles curbside organics capture — New York City's curbside organics program is collecting substantially more material, though Waste Dive notes significant room remains for greater capture. More organics moving out of the conventional waste stream means more specialized collection, processing, composting, and anaerobic-digestion infrastructure has to exist somewhere downstream. (Waste Dive)

Greyparrot and Circular Services bring AI into a New York MRF — The companies are piloting AI technology inside a materials recovery facility. This is one of the more tangible industrial AI use cases: cameras and software sitting directly on top of physical sorting infrastructure where small improvements in recovery rates can become actual commodity revenue. (Waste Dive)

Baltimore County approves a $68M Win Waste contract — Another meaningful municipal waste award drops into the contracted infrastructure bucket. These deals look boring because that is exactly what makes the economics useful. (Waste Dive)

Circular Services buys Re:Dish to combine reuse with recycling — The long-term plan is to offer reusable-container services anywhere Circular Services already handles recycling or food waste. That is a logical route-density play: use the existing collection network to layer another physical service onto the same customer relationship. (Waste Dive)

EPA withdrew PFAS Clean Water Act guidance — The withdrawal of guidelines designed to stop PFAS from entering drinking water could shift remediation costs from polluters to municipal utilities and ratepayers. Watch where the cost lands. (Public Radio East)

Waste Energy expanded its Midland waste-conversion campus to about 12.5 acres — The micro-cap waste-to-energy firm says its first commercial-scale tire-conversion system is in final buildout, with large equipment placement expected soon. (Morningstar)

AI may change mining work more than eliminate it — Mining Magazine’s latest look at adoption finds trust, accountability, and work intensification emerging as larger labor concerns than outright job destruction. Mining is shaping up as a good test of the “AI eats physical jobs” thesis because the software still has to coexist with people, machines and unforgiving operating environments. (Mining Magazine)

Dry bulk is drawing hedge-fund attention again — Tor Svelland called dry bulk one of the most attractive areas in shipping today while Fearnley Securities separately expects more consolidation across the industry. Commodity movement plus asset-heavy cyclicality makes the setup worth watching. (TradeWinds)

Tetra Tech subsidiary secures $17M U.S. Air Force MPES modernization and DevSecOps integration contract — Segue, a Tetra Tech company, was awarded a 3.5-year, $17 million firm-fixed-price sole-source contract to modernize the Air Force's Manpower Programming and Execution System, including DevSecOps integration and cloud migration. Work will be performed in Arlington, VA through March 29, 2030; the award was announced September 22. (OrangeSlices AI)

AI agents are moving into manufacturing operations — Infor is pitching agentic systems directly into manufacturing workflows, one of several signs today that enterprise AI is moving from generic copilots toward plant-specific operational tasks. (Manufacturing Dive/Infor)

Jacobs selected to support BGE's Konrad Repository project in Germany — Jacobs won a contract from Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung mbH (BGE), Germany's federal radioactive-waste disposal company, to provide advisory project-support services for the Konrad Repository in Salzgitter. Konrad is Germany's first nuclear-licensed final repository for low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste — a converted iron-ore mine designed to store up to 303,000 m³ — with construction expected to complete in the early 2030s. (Jacobs)