i'm really tired of ragebait on how advanced china's industrial base is.

let's dispel this by diving into NIST's MIC report.

note: do not read this if you're a gullible euro VC or western exec who would back down after a factory visit to china. we still need to act NOW. first, let's be clear what "advanced manufacturing" actually means:

it's not what, but HOW you manufacture. machines, software, process optimization, automated quality control. digitization, etc.

you can make a plastic bottle cap in a high-tech way or a low-tech way.

CHINA JUST WEAPONIZED THE ENTIRE RARE EARTH SUPPLY CHAIN

get used to reading chinese MOFCOM bulletins because they're writing american industrial policy now.

announced today: any product containing >0.1% chinese rare earth materials needs beijing's approval before re-export to third countries.

doesn't matter if you manufactured it in taiwan, vietnam, or texas.

chinese dysprosium in your magnet? chinese gallium in your chip? beijing gets veto power over the sale.

this is the nuclear option. US spent 3 years trying to deny china access to advanced chipmaking tools. china just responded with chokehold on literally every semiconductor fab, AI data center, defense contractor, and EV manufacturer on earth.

everything runs on chinese rare earths. building alternative supply chains takes 5-10 years minimum.

we don't have 5-10 years. effective december 1st.

the AI boom just hit a hard ceiling and we're still pretending we can offshore our way to prosperity.

time to reindustrialize like our lives depend on it. because they do. enjoy mofcom.gov.cn/zwgk/zcfb/art/…

so the US just figured out how to legally force chinese companies to hand over their tech without actually "forcing" them and nobody's talking about it. this is the story of eagle electronics, an ohio-based 'startup' that raised $14M and took over a $500M book of business eagle didn't exist until march 2024. they just got quectel who controls 40% of the global cellular module market to voluntarily hand over their manufacturing tech, source code, and send 30 employees to ohio to train workers

just finished reading through the house armed services committee drop. if it survives markup, 2025 could mark the single biggest shot of adrenaline into u.s. manufacturing capacity since ww2. a thread 👇 2/ headline: >$25b in direct spend aimed squarely at building things – new shipyard kit, missile lines, additive factories, depots, and the skilled-labor pipelines to run them.

manufacturing is hard. at @atomic_inc we're building the AWS of mass production. vertically integrated AI-powered factories. how? by building and training AI to make molds better, cheaper, and faster than anyone on earth. an evolution for the american industrial base. thread... today, only a small vanishing pool of highly specialized labor actually dictates the pace of the physical economy: tool & die makers. these highly skilled tradespeople are the engine and translational layer between designing a product and manufacturing it.