I do think that there's going to be massive funding deals, similar to what we saw this past year for compute build out. I think we're going to see massive funding deals for hardware based manufacturing build out in the United States... So you'll see a bunch of these big blockbuster deals for hardware build out in the US.
By late 2025, multiple large‑scale, multi‑billion‑dollar packages for U.S. hardware manufacturing had been announced, matching the prediction’s direction. In April 2025, the White House reported over $5 trillion in new U.S.-based investments in Trump’s first 100 days, emphasizing a series of blockbuster advanced‑manufacturing commitments: Apple’s $500 billion U.S. manufacturing and training plan, TSMC’s additional $100 billion for U.S. chip manufacturing, Johnson & Johnson’s $55 billion, Novartis’s $23 billion to build or expand ten U.S. plants, and Hyundai’s $21 billion U.S. investment including a $5.8 billion new steel plant—each framed as major U.S. manufacturing build‑outs rather than purely digital or services spending.(whitehouse.gov)
In parallel, semiconductor‑focused industrial policy continued to drive enormous hardware manufacturing capex. By 2025 the Commerce Department had distributed over $30 billion in CHIPS Act subsidies across 17 firms (including Intel, TSMC, Samsung, Micron), catalyzing more than $100 billion in new U.S. fab projects.(ainvest.com) TSMC specifically expanded its Arizona plans to a $65+ billion complex and, alongside earlier awards, received a $6.6 billion U.S. subsidy plus up to $5 billion in loans, while separately announcing an additional $100 billion U.S. chips‑manufacturing program and a multi‑fab Arizona “gigafab” cluster.(investing.com) These are clearly multi‑billion financing/subsidy‑linked build‑outs of physical manufacturing capacity in the U.S.
On the robotics/“physical AI” side, 2025 also saw U.S.-based manufacturing expansions tied directly to robotics: Figure AI announced BotQ, a high‑volume U.S. facility intended to manufacture 12,000 humanoid robots per year; Nvidia and Foxconn launched a new Houston AI manufacturing campus where humanoid robots will assemble Nvidia AI servers; and SoftBank unveiled “Project Crystal Land,” a proposed trillion‑dollar‑scale AI and robotics industrial hub in Arizona in partnership with TSMC, explicitly framed as a U.S. manufacturing center for AI and robotics hardware.(en.wikipedia.org) While not every robotics project discloses a precise multi‑billion capex figure, they are part of the same wave of highly publicized industrial‑scale hardware and robotics build‑outs.
Taken together, these 2025 announcements constitute several multi‑billion‑dollar financing and subsidy–driven build‑outs of U.S. hardware (and related robotics) manufacturing. Their headline sizes (tens to hundreds of billions, with some projects framed at the trillion‑dollar level) and the way they dominate policy and business news place them in the same general league of scale and prominence as the 2023–24 AI compute megaprojects, so Friedberg’s prediction is best judged as having come true in substance.