The headlines on American manufacturing have it wrong.

The story isn’t just about tariffs or reshoring incentives.

The real headline is the trillion-dollar number — the annual investment required to double U.S. manufacturing capacity. That’s more than the GDP of Switzerland.

This is just one of the highlights from my thought-provoking chat with Aidan Madigan-Curtis from Eclipse (Links at the end).

Before Eclipse, she was an executive at Samsara and the manufacturing lead for the Apple Watch— bringing deep expertise in supply chains and what it will take to rebuild U.S. manufacturing.

And here’s another kicker: even if the money shows up, the U.S. is still short 5 million skilled workers. That’s why building projects are delayed not by chips or capital, but by the lack of plumbers, electricians, and technicians.

This isn’t just a finance problem. It’s structural.

▪️ Supply chains span thousands of miles.

▪️ 90% of rare earth magnets are processed in China.

▪️ Chips made here are still packaged and tested overseas.

Without fixing these bottlenecks, new factories risk becoming expensive paperweights.

Two truths can coexist:

▪️ The opportunity is enormous.

▪️ The obstacles are real.

The easy take is to call this push a subsidy bubble. The deeper truth: these dollars are pouring concrete, training workers, and laying the backbone for the next century of energy, defense, and compute.

The better analogy isn’t tariffs — it’s the Bessemer process. When Andrew Carnegie brought it to the U.S., it dropped steel costs 10x and fueled the modern economy.

The question isn’t whether America re-industrializes.

It’s about how the HardTech startup industry can plug into the gaps and achieve stellar outcomes for the U.S. economy.

Checkout the links

Aidan Madigan-Curtis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-madigan-curtis/

Eclipse: https://eclipse.capital/

Rohit Yadav: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohityadav23/

Article 1: What Would It Take to Bring Back U.S. Manufacturing? Part 1: America’s Structural Headwinds. Link –

Article 2: What Would It Take to Bring Back U.S. Manufacturing? Part 2: Making American Manufacturing More Productive

Article 3: The Future of Domestic Manufacturing. Link:

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Empire

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