When I arrived this March in Cherokee, Alabama, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Hadrian’s defense tech factory, some of the first workers I saw were Lynyrd Skynyrd’s roadies. They were setting up for a show to celebrate the opening of Hadrian’s fourth “AI-powered” automated facility, expected to start churning out precision components for military contractors and the Pentagon by the end of the year. Hadrian’s founder, Chris Power, alongside backers like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, hope to build components for the next generation of American nuclear submarines with as little human participation as possible.

Power immigrated to the United States from Australia in 2019, determined to save the country from over fifty years of deindustrialization. As he put it in a 2024 interview, “I literally moved over here because I had this thesis that the U.S. industrial base was in massive decline.” A year after emigrating, he founded a manufacturing technology startup.…