⚛️ Factory-Grade Fission and Waste Solutions; 🌋 Geothermal Expands the Map; 🤖 AI Runs EDA and Health Ops; 🛰️ Reusable Reentry Closes the Space Supply Chain & more | Deep Tech Briefing n. 90
Weekly Intelligence on Deep Tech Startups and Venture Capital.
Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing!
This week, we move from Marvell’s balance-sheet engineering around AI photonics to a wider pattern of reindustrialization: sovereign LPs in chip tools, district geothermal, quantum alliances, and PE using aerospace as a buyout engine for deep tech.
Deep Tech Briefing Stack:
Interesting Reading – our collection of readings that are worth sitting with.
The Big Idea – a critical inflection, unpacked into a strategic view.
Deep Tech Key Moves – field intelligence on this week’s most important moves.
Signal in the Data – the one chart that should change how you see deep tech this week.
Deep Tech Power Play – where regulation, incentives, and influence redraw the opportunity set in deep tech.
🔶 Interesting Reading
AI fast-tracks chocolate reformulation amid cocoa crisis FoodNavigator — How major brands are using domain-specific models to redesign recipes in weeks instead of years, protecting margins and brand equity through the cocoa shock.
As Energy Department prioritizes AI and fusion, basic research faces squeeze Science — Inside the U.S. DOE budget reshuffle: more money and political attention for AI, exascale, and fusion demos, and mounting pressure on the investigator-led basic research that feeds the deep tech pipeline.
Could evergreen funds provide the exit GP stakes investors want PitchBook — How evergreen vehicles could give GP-stakes investors cleaner exits, recycling cash from dividend-rich franchises instead of forcing sales into a soft secondaries market.
Nvidia, Qualcomm join Indian deep tech startup investment alliance Global Corporate Venturing — Why major chip vendors are helping India build a serious early-stage pipeline in semis, space, quantum, and robotics, not just consumer apps.
Saudi AI Startup Launches Arabic LLM AI Business — An LLM built in Saudi Arabia and tuned for Arabic, with concrete use cases in government, finance, and healthcare—useful lens on “model sovereignty” outside the West.
Europe can be a global technology leader—if it removes barriers to innovation AgFunderNews — Europe isn’t short of research or capital, but slow approvals and opaque rules risk pushing the most ambitious agrifood and deep tech projects elsewhere.
AI credit concerns playing out differently in investment grade and high yield, Goldman says Reuters — The AI buildout is now a credit story: issuance tied to data center capex is rising, performance is under pressure, and the risk profile looks very different in investment grade versus high yield.
AI startup Cohere CEO says US holds edge over China in AI race Reuters — For Aidan Gomez, the real contest is who becomes the trusted provider of AI infrastructure; today, the U.S.–Canada bloc still looks like the default partner for many advanced democracies.
Biotech Wasn’t Ready for AI’s Speed; Here’s How We Catch Up Bioprocess Online — A practical checklist for AI-native biotech: where algorithms outrun lab work, CMC, and regulators, and how to stop “AI-found molecules” from remaining just slideware