⚛️ Fusion SPACs Test Public Appetite; 🛰️ Thermal-IR & Sovereign Space as Utilities; ✈️ Hydrogen Jets; 🌾 Spray Drones Localize Under Security Rules and more| Deep Tech Briefing #95
Weekly Intelligence on Deep Tech Startups and Venture Capital.
Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing!
This week, fusion edges toward an asset class—SPAC paths, stellarator testbeds, and tritium supply chains pulling it onto infrastructure timelines—just as sovereign-but-commercial space systems, micro-GEOs, and AI-native weather constellations turn orbit into a regulated utility layer.
In parallel, UV-C vineyard robots and farm DERMS treat land as dispatchable grid hardware, mycelium and insect ingredients plus shared cell banks reframe biology as reusable IP infrastructure, and defense, AI, and quantum converge as corporate capital, inference rails, BCI IPOs, EU Inc, quantum photonics pilots, and even deep-sea mining rules quietly rewrite who finances, standardizes, and ultimately owns deep tech’s production stack.
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
AgFunderNews
The best ag AI thesis here is almost boring on purpose: outcome-tied, explainable, workflow-native—because adoption follows trust, and “small efficiency gains” (inputs → yield → runoff) compound brutally at system scale.
Trump’s Rare Earth Push Extends Lifeline to Green Tech
Bloomberg
Rare earths are getting re-priced by policy: proclamations, potential minimum prices, and a national-security framing that de-risks capex for startups—while the China concentration risk stays the underlying forcing function.
‘War Unicorns’: The New Billion-Dollar Startups Rewriting Pentagon Strategy
19FortyFive
“Speed to capability” + unicorn valuations is the easy part; the hard part is turning Silicon Valley prototypes into boring, reliable workhorses—because in defense, the real moat is sustainment, not the demo.
How next-generation nuclear reactors break out of the 20th-century blueprint
MIT Technology Review
Molten salt, TRISO fuel, new coolants, different form factors: the subtext is that “power” is re-entering the critical path for AI + industry, and reactor innovation is being re-framed as a deployment-speed + cost problem, not just a physics problem.
Taiwan to invest $250B in US semiconductor manufacturing
TechCrunch
$250B in direct investment plus another $250B in credit guarantees is less “industrial policy headline” and more “supply chain as alliance structure”—with tariffs, incentives, and capacity build-out all fused into one geopolitical instrument.
Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund preps for a wave of IPOs
Semafor
PIF lining up multiple potential listings/sell-downs (including a surprisingly eclectic mix of assets) reads like the next phase of “sovereign scaling”: recycle domestic stakes → fund giga-projects + external deals—while trying to re-liquefy Tadawul via foreign participation.
Army moves to assess AI’s ‘unpredictable behaviors’ and safeguard autonomous systems
DefenseScoop
A $6.3M GUARD prototype focused on detecting emergent/unwanted behaviors is a quiet signal that “AI assurance” is becoming budgeted reality—testing, risk profiling, and explainability are turning into procurement categories.
Anthropic CEO says selling advanced AI chips to China is ‘crazy’
Bloomberg
Amodei’s “selling nukes to North Korea” analogy is basically the AI stack arguing with itself: chip revenue vs. frontier-model security—export controls are now a first-order product constraint, not a policy footnote.
🔸 The Big Idea
Is the fusion “asset class” upon us?
From lab milestones to Nasdaq: how fusion listings could reset valuation benchmarks, funding terms, and who captures the upside.
Over the past 18 months, the electricity narrative has become easier to explain and harder to finance: structurally rising demand, slow-to-expand infrastructure, and a global scramble for new “firm” capacity to support data centers, advanced manufacturing, and electrification.
In its World Energy Outlook 2025, the IEA estimates electricity demand will rise by roughly 40% by 2035 in its baseline scenarios, exceeding 50% in the Net Zero scenario.
In the United States, the DOE—drawing on LBNL analysis—projects that data center electricity consumption could double or even triple by 2028; Reuters reported an estimate that would take data center load to 74–132 GW and as much as 6.7%–12% of U.S. electricity consumption.
In this context, capital is returning to capex-intensive, long-horizon technologies—provided there is a credible path to scalable, industrializable, and bankable power.
Within this backdrop sits one of this week’s more notable announcements: General Fusion has signed a definitive business combination agreement with the SPAC Spring Valley Acquisition Corp. III to list on Nasdaq (expected ticker “GFUZ”) by mid-2026.
Following the deal announced in December that would take TAE Technologies public via a merger (reportedly at around a $6 billion valuation), the sequence of announcements makes it more plausible to speak of “fusion” as an investable asset class—not because the technology is already ready, but because