🚀 IPO Gravity in Orbit; ☢️ Data Centers Pre-Buy Nuclear; 🧬 Regulated AI Goes Vertical; ⚛️ Fusion Twins De-Risk Build; 🌐 6G Goes National Security & more | Deep Tech Briefing n. 93

Weekly Intelligence on Deep Tech Startups and Venture Capital.

Happy New Year again, everyone, and welcome back to the first Deep Tech Briefing of the year—our weekly intelligence on global deep tech startups and private markets!

This week, the stack comes into focus: new-space IPOs recast launch as core infra, tiny nations sign MoUs for turnkey orbital capacity, and hyperspectral data goes on tap via marketplaces, just as ChatGPT Health formalizes models as a clinical front door, Mobileye buys a humanoid body for its autonomy stack, fusion twins and Natrium reactors are scoped as baseload for data centers, and biochar, electrolyzers, solid-state packs and wireless power start to look less like gadgets and more like balance-sheet assets.

Enjoy the read!

Deep Tech Briefing Stack:

1. Interesting Reading – our collection of readings that are worth sitting with.

2. The Big Idea – a critical inflection, unpacked into a strategic view.

3. Deep Tech Key Moves – field intelligence on this week’s most important moves.

4. Signal in the Data – the one chart that should change how you see deep tech this week.

5. Deep Tech Power Play – where regulation, incentives, and influence redraw the opportunity set in deep tech.

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🔶 Interesting Reading

• Why Andreessen Horowitz’s massive funding round signals a shift in Silicon Valley’s priorities Los Angeles Times — A16z’s $15B-plus raise isn’t just “more dry powder”; it’s a bet that AI, defense, bio and American Dynamism are converging into a single geopolitical asset class, with one firm positioning itself as a primary capital router for that stack.

• Why global partnerships matter for scaling hydrogen World Economic Forum — Japan’s hydrogen push reads like a blueprint for climate-aligned industrial strategy: policy, offtake, supply chains and a dedicated hydrogen fund woven together into something investors can actually underwrite, not just applaud from a podium.

• Why India’s Deep-Tech Moment Matters to the Global Chip Industry EE Times — A chip-insider view of India’s shift from IT services hub to deep-tech node, via new alliances, capital pools and the India Deep Tech Alliance—helpful context if your semiconductor or defense thesis still treats India as just another offshore talent pool.

• Space Data Centers Could Move to Space, Says Jeff Bezos The New York Times — The space-DC crowd is no longer just tweeting: Bezos, Musk, Google and others are openly sketching gigawatt-scale AI constellations in orbit to escape land, power and permitting—alongside a very nontrivial bill for launch costs, radiation-hard chips and orbital heat rejection.

• Anger in Papua New Guinea after Starlink ordered to shut down internet services The Guardian — PNG’s Starlink shutdown is a sharp case study in sovereignty vs. reliance: thousands of clinics, schools and SMEs discovering what it means when your national regulator and your only viable backhaul provider fall out.

• Venezuela, Trump and the $100B question for oil investors CNBC — Post-Maduro, Trump is effectively running a roadshow for $100B-scale oil investment into Venezuela, mixing sanctions leverage, security promises and reimbursement chatter—a live lab for how frontier-risk capital actually prices regime change and resource grabs.

• The Push to Make Semiconductors in Space Just Took a Serious Leap Forward Scientific American — Space Forge’s uncrewed plasma demo nudges chip-making in microgravity from ISS experiment toward commercial process flow—useful for anyone thinking about where materials, IP and export controls land when fabs themselves start to leave Earth.

• African agrifood VC ‘does not need to follow the Silicon Valley growth trajectory’ AgFunderNews — A candid argument for building an entirely different VC playbook for African agrifood: slower ramps, more operational grind, and returns tied to resilient food systems rather than pure software multiples.

• Building materials are getting closer to doubling as batteries MIT Technology Review — Electron-conducting carbon concrete that acts as a supercapacitor turns “battery in the walls” from metaphor into early hardware—interesting for anyone modeling long-duration storage, grid-interactive buildings or infra where the structure itself becomes the asset.

• Almost 80 European deep tech university spinouts reached $1B valuations or $100M in revenue in 2025 TechCrunch — Dealroom’s spinout census shows Europe’s academic deep-tech funnel is now a $398B asset class, with 76 companies at unicorn/Centaur scale—great fodder if you’re thinking about where to place early-stage chips vs. where the growth-capital gap still bites.

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🔸 The Big Idea

From Niche to Infrastructure: How New Space IPOs Are Rewriting the Deep Tech Playbook

A new wave of space listings signals that space is becoming a core economic layer—and investors need to rethink where value will actually be captured.

At the start of 2026, space is no longer an exotic vertical: it has become an infrastructure layer of the global economy, a bit like the internet twenty years ago or semiconductors today. Estimates from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey point to a space economy that could grow from around $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion by 2035, with average annual growth of about 9%, almost double global GDP. In parallel, in 2024–2025 governments spent more than €120 billion on space programs, while private capital added another €7 billion in just one year.

It is within this context—structural growth, higher interest rates that have filtered projects, the return of advanced manufacturing—that we should read the stream of news of the past few weeks: the potential SpaceX IPO and LandSpace’s 7.5 billion yuan listing in Shanghai.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room.

SpaceX is the obvious gravitational center. After a secondary sale that valued the company around $800 billion, reports now suggest a public listing target near $1.5 trillion, putting it within striking distance of Saudi Aramco’s $1.7 trillion debut as the largest IPO ever by equity value raised.