Wegmans is putting $110M into its supply chain, Bechtel walked away from TerraPower's nuclear project and 200 workers got laid off, and Hadrian is building factories before its customers exist. The Army has enough drones but not enough operators, thieves are stealing beef trucks, and 80% of consumers say they'd try an AI-recommended restaurant.

Travis Kalanick is back with $1.7B for Atoms, On signed Mbappé while Nike bleeds out, Class 8 truck orders are turning with freight rates, a shippers' coalition is pooling demand for 2,500 electric trucks, and Tesla opened a Semi factory sized for 50,000 trucks a year.

Wegmans is a grocery store, with currently around 115 locations. The company is planning to invest a big chunk of change into its expansion. This capital will be used to support the physical infrastructure that gets food from supplier to the stores. Wegmans is getting a shout today because they are opening a location near my house, potentially closing an Orvis store in the process. Larger grocery store chains are increasingly investing into their supply chains to behave more like an industrial network more than consumer business. This is what enables them to offer their customers the best prices on their favorite items.

Bechtel splits with Bill Gates-backed nuclear project. This is upsetting news, despite not being a fan of Bill Gates. I am a fan of Nuclear power and because of Bechtel exiting this project, 200 workers were laid off. News has it that Techtel and TerraPower, were unable to agree on the next phase of their project per a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, that they filled with the state of Virginia. Bechtel noted that they will help employees impacted to find new roles on other projects.

On September 18th, On announced that they would enter in to the Soccer/Football world. A year before this announcement the company announced that soccer legend, Thierry Henry was joining the company as Director of Football. Both of the lads are French so it makes sense that Thierry’s first athlete they would go after is French. I used to play soccer growing up and mostly wore Adidas cleats, now I think all cleats look like ass. So i am excited to see what this partnership brings. As the company is now taking advantage of robotic manufacturing to create this shoe. Mbappe left Nike for some cash and equity with On, I think more will follow. Long story short, Nike is cooked. I don’t think there will ever be another single clothing brand in the world worth $250 billion. Maybe every 15-20 years we will see companies like On emerge and take massive amounts of market share and lose it. This will cycle on forever.

Manufacturing is emerging as a core advantage in turning factories into flexible pools of standardized capacity, where shared capex, software, and modular production let manufacturers spread risk across multiple programs instead of betting entire factories on single demand forecasts. The most interesting thing Chris Power said in his recent Relentless interview has almost nothing to do with CNC machines. It is that Hadrian basically has to build the factory before the customer exists. Power basically says this directly. Customers need to believe the capacity will be there when they need it. In American industrial production, that increasingly means the manufacturer has to demonstrate capacity before the customer is willing to commit enough volume to justify building it.

This one is fairly obvious and yet sort of interesting because of all we are hearing about autonomous drones. But at least for the next 10 years (I think) there will be humans controlling drones. There maybe be some sort of ratio where a human is in the loop and controlling up a certain amount of drones at once, depending on autonomy level. Reading this headline makes me think of the seen in ‘The Agency’ where a drone pilot takes out the wrong person, and confronts his CO about this and even mentioning that he was supposed to be a ‘real’ pilot but was plucked out of the academy to fly drones. My dumbest take on this subject is if there could be some sort of part time role for these drone pilots, enabling potential hire to take on the position without the mental strain of piloting a drone for who knows what. That obviously leads to a security risk which is why it was a dumb take. But I also don’t think they will just be able to scoop up a generation of gamers to do this job either.

Well well well, how often do you read about thieves stealing some beef. While you don’t often expect that your beef is going to get stolen, you should always expect the unexpected, so that if a supply chain error ever occurs you are ready to solve it. This turns supply chain security into both an engineering problem and a public safety / policing issue. If thieves are starting to target beef trucks, what are the down stream impacts of that, how much will that sandwich cost you at the deli, how much will that steak cost you at the giant eagle. Don’t steal beef people, its not cool.

Big if true. because in reality its 100% of consumers would try AI recommended restaurants, they already are and have been for years. silly consumers. Its stupid we just are now calling results from claude, gpt or gemini ‘AI’ when our social feeds are the same thing. “same same but different but still same same.” as James Franco said in The Interview

This is fairly old news but I still think its exciting. I was only ever a user of the Uber Eats and by then Travis was out of Uber and I had no idea the backstory. My take on Atoms is that Travis Kalanick is trying to build an operating system for the physical economy. The “CPU is manufacturing, storage is real estate, network is transportation” framing sounds big and fancy, but it is directionally useful because that is exactly what most industrial businesses still lack: a common software and hardware aka a robot built to move material, operate equipment or automate one ugly industrial workflow. It needs to produce a measurable return on capital. It does not need to look cool on Twitter.

FTR says improving freight rates and tighter capacity are pushing fleets toward replacement purchases. Equipment demand normally trails freight economics, so the turn matters for truck OEMs, components and the aftermarket. I think with the increased diesel prices although they will likely fall within the year, we are going to see several more bankrupcty’s within the trucking space. Although we are about to mention the upcoming Tesla Semi fleet, from what the demo customers have said about these things, I think many larger companies will try their luck with a Tesla fleet.

Interesting counterpoint to the note previously. Microsoft, PepsiCo and other companies are pooling truck demand to get equipment and infrastructure economics that would be difficult to achieve independently. The more interesting piece is the buying structure: industrial technologies with weak standalone economics can move much faster when customers aggregate procurement. Tesla has been selected a primary OEM for a 2,500 unit order with Volvo,Kenworth and RIDE acting as secondary OEMs.

Tesla has opened its dedicated Semi factory with stated capacity for 50,000 trucks annually. The interesting number is not current deliveries but the size of the industrial footprint Tesla is now willing to build around heavy-duty trucking. I think even sell 25k of these semi’s annually other track manufactures will be shaking in their boots. We are currently seeing a slow ramp up in demand for these, but after PepsiCo and several other transport majors release news about successful demos the little dawgs will follow. I estimate Tesla will Tesla a 250k of these annually by 2033.

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