Reading List 01/24/26

Railcar launched ICBM, via Wikipedia.

Welcome to the reading list, a weekly list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology.

Experimenting with a new format this week, with more links but with shorter descriptions. My intent here is to try and make the reading list somewhat more comprehensive: to make it closer to a survey of everything notable that happened in the world of buildings, infrastructure, and related topics, in addition to a list of interesting things to read. Since it’s an experiment I’m going to leave this one unpaywalled, but future reading lists will go back to having a paywall partway down.

Housing

• Trump issues executive order to try and stop institutional investors from buying single family homes. “The order directs executive agencies to find ways to stop the federal government from backing loans and providing other financial incentives for institutional investor purchases of single-family homes that might otherwise have been bought by an individual homeowner.”

• California Forever, a new city being planned north of the Bay Area and backed by various tech folks, signs “the largest construction labor agreement in history” with various California construction unions. The agreement requires that most construction be done using union labor. Not sure if this is a bullish signal (since it probably increases the likelihood that the project goes forward) or a bearish signal (since it probably makes using any innovative or novel construction methods harder).

• Claims that San Francisco is now one of the fastest California cities to get new housing projects permitted. “Just about everyone in every city dept now understands it’s their job to get permits issued, quickly. Managers got their marching orders from [new mayor] Daniel Lurie and workflows have gotten much better.”

• Louisville joins the cities that are adopting AI to help speed up permitting.

Manufacturing

• The WSJ on BYD and other Chinese EV manufacturers. “The Shenzhen-based automaker delivered more than a million vehicles outside China in 2025, the company said, more than double the previous year’s total.” BYD is aiming for 2000(!) car dealerships in Europe by the end of 2026.

• Sony splits off its TV business, forming a 49%-owned joint venture with China’s TCL. The end of an era.

• Relatedly, philanthropist and former energy trader John Arnold on his recent visit to China. “I don’t know if Chinese manufacturers will ever make money but I came away not wanting to invest in any manufacturing business in the rest of the world.”

• After struggling for years to build new icebreakers and letting our icebreaking capabilities gradually wither, the US is buying icebreakers from Finland, who have designed 80% and built 60% of the world’s icebreakers. (For more on US icebreakers, see my previous essay about them.)

• Washington state lawmakers, in an attempt to stop the manufacture of 3D printed “ghost guns”, introduce a bill that would effectively ban all manufacturing. Someone in the comments pointed out that this is incorrect.

• The Financial Times on the difficulties of trying to bring back US manufacturing. Tariffs have driven up the costs for US manufacturers (since either they or their suppliers rely on imported parts), and even with an extra 20-40% tacked on to the price goods from places like China are still often cheaper.

• Even as the US works to onshore semiconductor manufacturing (encouraging TSMC to build fabs here), the companies that make semiconductor manufacturing equipment are increasingly moving their operations offshore. “In 2022 we flagged Lam Research expanding in Malaysia. Today, most of its high-volume production is there, not the U.S. That trend has only accelerated.”

• Micron breaks ground on $100 billion DRAM fab in New York.

• Utah working on a plan to meet 25% of the US’s demand for critical minerals.

• How TSMC makes money.

Energy

• The EIA has a brief analysis on the potential for repurposing retired military aircraft engines as energy-generating gas turbines for data centers. “We estimate the engines that once powered the retired aircraft could add up to as much as 40,000 MW of electricity generating capacity, or about 10% more than the current generation capacity of Arizona. But this is an estimate of theoretical capacity, not the feasibility of deployment. Practical considerations include the unclear state of the retired engines (from planes retired for more than a decade, on average), military mission needs, and the logistics around removing engines from storage and attaching them to generators.”

• Chimney sweeps seeing a resurgence in demand in the UK. “According to the National Association of Chimney Sweeps, demand has been bolstered by high energy prices, the popularity of wood-burning stoves and an international climate that has prompted warnings that electricity supplies could be vulnerable to attack by hostile states like Russia.”

• Dan Wang, author of “Breakneck”, on Chinese and US energy policy. “Chinese technology companies are paving the way for a world that will be powered by electric motors rather than gas-guzzling engines. It is a decisively 21st-century approach not just to solve its own energy problems, but also to sell batteries and other electric products to everyone else.” For more on the “electric tech stack”, you can read Packy McCormick’s (very long) essay The Electric Slide.

• India seems to be following in China’s footsteps and electrifying quickly.

• The governor of New York wants to add 5 gigawatts of nuclear power capacity. And Japan restarted a reactor at the world’s largest nuclear power plant which had been shuttered after Fukushima.

Infrastructure

• Why is drinking water so expensive in the US? “Americans open a tap and get water much like their parents and grandparents did, but the price of water and sewer for households has more than doubled since the early 1980s, adjusted for inflation. American households in large cities now spend about $1,300 a year on water and sewer charges, even though per-capita use has actually decreased.” Unreasonably strict environmental standards seem to be a major driver.

• Energy isn’t the only input that data centers are demanding in increasingly enormous quantities. Data centers will consume 70% of memory chips made in 2026. Data center memory demand is causing a shortage severe enough that there’s a wikipedia article about it.

• JLL’s 2026 Global Data Center Outlook. Projects a doubling of data center capacity between 2026 and 2030.

• Countries around the world are increasingly drawing down slow-to-replenish sources of water like underground aquifers, pushing them towards “water bankruptcy”.

• To help speed data center construction, a proposed law would exempt US power plants from federal regulation if they didn’t connect to the overall power grid. This would let them do things like avoid the interconnection queue.

• Spain had two fatal train crashes in two days, and two more non-fatal crashes in the next three days.

Technology

• In general I suspect that insurance company incentives, and the pricing of various risks, are underrated as a driver of large-scale technical and social change. Insurance company advocacy, for instance, was a driver of building code adoption in the late 19th/early 20th century, and it seems likely we might see large-scale shifts in patterns of land use due to the rising cost of homeowners insurance. In that vein, insurance startup Lemonade is offering a 50% discount for miles driven on Tesla’s Full Self Drive. “The new offering cuts per-mile rates for FSD-engaged driving by approximately 50%, reflecting what the data shows to be significantly reduced risk during autonomous operation.” This makes me wonder what Waymo’s insurance looks like.

• Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launches its Starlink competitor, TeraWave. And in Iran it turns out it’s possible to jam Starlink. “Military-grade GPS jammers deployed since January 8 have cut satellite internet performance by as much as 80% in parts of the country.”

• Chris Paxton on how human should a humanoid robot should be. Robots often benefit from having legs (since legs allow them to handle more difficult terrain, and lift heavy objects without needing a large base), but that doesn’t mean they need to mimic a human’s movements or joint arrangement.

• Trends in EV battery degradation. EV batteries lose charging capacity over time, on average around 2.3% per year with a lot of variation. Using fast chargers seems to degrade capacity more quickly. Hot climates also seem to degrade capacity more quickly compared to mild climates.

• Drone delivery startup Zipline raises $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation. They’ve completed more than 2 million deliveries.

• Chinese robotaxi companies are beating the US to expand in the Middle East.

Misc.

• Moon trees are trees grown from seeds taken into orbit around the Moon, initially by Apollo 14 in 1971, and later by Artemis I in 2022.

• A journey through China’s coal country.

• Stewart Brand’s book on maintenance is now available.

• Download 3D models of IKEA furniture.

Thanks for reading!