⚛️ Fusion PPAs Before Electrons; 🛰️ Space Nuclear Fuel Steps Up; 💧Microbes Turn Oil Wells into Hydrogen; ⚡Power Beaming Inches Toward Orbit & more | Deep Tech Briefing n. 91
Weekly Intelligence on Deep Tech Startups and Venture Capital.
Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing!
This week, we move from fusion offtake contracts as the real product to a wider pattern of industrialization-before-science-fiction: space-solar powering orbital data centers, hydrogen business jets turning into factories on the ground, glyphosate-cleanup microbes slotting into existing ag, and AI radiology chains scaling through public markets.
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
VC fundraising hits decade lows in 2025 despite AI boom WebProNews — A reminder that “AI is booming” ≠ “venture is healthy”—LP constraints, distribution drought, and barbell outcomes turning the middle of the market into a slow-motion reset.
OpenAI + Disney + Sora Axios — IP meets generative video: what it looks like when a premium rights-holder experiments with creation tooling—hinting at the licensing, guardrails, and brand-control playbooks that will matter most.
The race to mine the moon is on — and it urgently needs some clear international rules The Conversation— Lunar ISRU is drifting from sci-fi to procurement—while the legal layer lags behind, setting up future fights over access, exclusion, and what “property” even means off-Earth.
AI is making spacecraft propulsion more efficient — and could even lead to nuclear-powered rockets Space.com — A useful view of where ML shows up in real flight dynamics—optimizing burns, trajectories, and margins—while quietly expanding the design space for next-gen (including nuclear) propulsion.
Study quantifies costs of EU Space Act to European and U.S. companies SpaceNews — Compliance as an industrial policy instrument: who eats the paperwork, who exits the market, who delays launches—an early map of second-order effects on cross-border space supply chains.
How Australia can avoid bleeding out on R&D Capital Brief — A blunt diagnosis of Australia’s R&D “leakage” problem—plus the policy levers that actually change founder incentives, retention, and onshore commercialization (not just press releases).
U.S. investors are going big on China AI despite concerns in Congress The Wall Street Journal — The capital markets version of “strategic ambiguity”—money chasing China AI upside while policy risk compounds in the background, turning governance and diligence into the real edge.
The data-center power boom (and the weird adjacencies it unlocks) Axios — Data centers as the new energy sink reshaping capex and timelines—where “power-first” thinking creates surprising winners and pulls non-obvious industrial tech into the AI supply chain.
Sequoia doesn’t want a king to run its $9 billion hedge fund The Wall Street Journal — Governance under stress: when performance, personality, and incentives collide—worth reading as a case study in institutionalizing decision-making once the org outgrows hero operators.