Freeport-McMoRan's board approved a $4.5B brownfield expansion at Bagdad, Arizona, aiming to more than double mining and milling rates to over 400M lb of copper a year by mid-2030. The mine has run a fully autonomous haulage fleet since 2025, and the company claims more than 4,000 construction jobs. Copper for the grid and AI buildout is coming from a mine that has operated since 1945.
Stakeholder comments on EO 14421, issued Aug 26, urge DOE to judge software and remote-access risk by function rather than country of origin before rules due Dec 24. Wood Mackenzie and RMI flag that transformers are already short and that bulk-power imports run more than $22B to $30B a year. Securing the grid this way runs into a market that cannot buy enough equipment as it is.
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.
