Duncan, South Carolina startup Aformic raised a $6.95M seed led by Veteran Ventures and claims more than $34M in orders, with hundreds of AMRs and autonomous forklifts live at Toyota, 3M, Oshkosh Defense and others. It will use the money to build robots for AI data-center construction and maintenance. The order and fleet figures are the company's own, but the labor bottleneck it is chasing is real.
Saronic's second 180-foot Marauder autonomous ship is in the water under its own power at the former Gulf Craft yard in Franklin, Louisiana. CEO Dino Mavrookas says the hull took 8% fewer labor hours than the first, and the yard aims for 20 Marauders a year once a roughly $250M rebuild finishes. The rate is a company target, not a contract, but a yard that was shutting down is now tracking labor hours per hull.
Joe Harris of Alloy lays out how robotics teams get to 1,000 deployed robots: L0 to L3 support tiers, uploading MCAP run logs, and a learning loop where each fix reaches the whole fleet. He draws on agriculture, defense, maritime and humanoid fleets. It comes from a vendor, but robots per support person is a useful number for any ops team running a fleet.
For robotics and operations leads: a support and learning model for scaling a robot fleet.
J.D. Capelouto's election-night thread mapped local bans, project votes and recalls aimed at data centers across about 40 localities in 13 states. It drew about 1.03M views and 2,200 bookmarks as races were called. Pair it with the Latitude and DCD tallies: siting is now decided at the county level.
