Investing in defense, energy, and public safety is not just another vertical. These foundational sectors uphold the stable democracy on which all other tech, like B2B SaaS, depends. A failure in these foundations renders investments in higher-level software and services worthless.
The administration's explicit focus on re-shoring manufacturing and preparing for potential geopolitical conflict provides a clear investment playbook. Capital should flow towards commodities and companies critical to the military-industrial complex, such as producers of copper, steel, and rare earth metals.
The sectors within the "American Dynamism" thesis—defense, energy, space, manufacturing—are not siloed but form an interdependent system. Strong national security requires a resilient energy grid and space-based communications, which in turn depend on domestic manufacturing and critical minerals. This holistic view is crucial for both investors and policymakers.
For its American Dynamism fund, Andreessen Horowitz provides more than capital; it fields a dedicated policy team in Washington D.C. This team works to change structural government problems, like defense procurement, creating a more favorable market for its portfolio and the broader startup ecosystem.
For today's high-uncertainty economy, a barbell strategy is optimal. It involves playing safely in liquid assets like front-end government bonds while making long-term private market investments that solve geopolitical vulnerabilities in areas like rare earths, drones, or domestic chip manufacturing.
Under 'Sanae-nomics,' Japan's growth strategy is pivoting towards sectors linked to national security. This includes not only defense and heavy industries but also advanced technology like AI, robotics, and quantum computing, as well as energy and food security. These areas are expected to be core beneficiaries of the new administration's industrial policy.
Before AI delivers long-term deflationary productivity, it requires a massive, inflationary build-out of physical infrastructure. This makes sectors like utilities, pipelines, and energy infrastructure a timely hedge against inflation and a diversifier away from concentrated tech bets.
Unlike SaaS startups focused on finding product-market fit (market risk), deep tech ventures tackle immense technical challenges. If they succeed, they enter massive, pre-existing trillion-dollar markets like energy or shipping where demand is virtually guaranteed, eliminating market risk entirely.
The defense tech sector is experiencing a perfect storm. This 'golden triangle' consists of: 1) Desperate customers in the Pentagon and Congress seeking innovation, 2) A wave of experienced founders graduating from successful firms like SpaceX and Anduril, and 3) Abundant downstream capital ready to fund growth.
Geopolitical competition with China has forced the U.S. government to treat AI development as a national security priority, similar to the Manhattan Project. This means the massive AI CapEx buildout will be implicitly backstopped to prevent an economic downturn, effectively turning the sector into a regulated utility.
The massive capital expenditure on AI infrastructure is not just a private sector trend; it's framed as an existential national security race against China's superior electricity generation capacity. This government backing makes it difficult to bet against and suggests the spending cycle is still in its early stages.