The Infrastructure of Progress: A Weekly Survey of Buildings, Industry, and Energy

The weekly reading list from Brian Potter serves as a barometer for the often-invisible currents shaping our built environment. This edition, dated January 24, 2026, reveals a landscape in flux, where traditional industries grapple with new technologies and policy interventions attempt to steer outcomes. The themes are not isolated; they form a tapestry of interconnected pressures on housing, manufacturing, energy, and infrastructure.

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Housing and Urban Development

The intersection of policy and private capital is starkly illustrated by President Trump's executive order targeting institutional investors in the single-family home market. The directive, which aims to cut off federal financial incentives for these purchases, represents a direct intervention in a market where institutional ownership has grown significantly. The order's mechanism—directing agencies to stop backing loans and incentives—is a lever pulled from the federal side, attempting to counterbalance market forces that have made homeownership increasingly competitive for individuals. This move sits alongside a significant development in California, where the planned city of California Forever has signed what is described as the "largest construction labor agreement in history" with state construction unions. This agreement mandates union labor for the majority of construction work. The implications are dual-edged: while it may provide a more stable path to project approval and execution by aligning with powerful political stakeholders, it could also constrain the adoption of novel, potentially more efficient construction methods that might not fit traditional union workflows. Concurrently, San Francisco is reported to be accelerating its housing permitting process, with a new mayor's office driving a cultural shift within city departments to prioritize speed. This local efficiency gain is mirrored in Louisville, where AI is being deployed to streamline permitting, suggesting a broader trend toward digitizing and automating municipal processes to alleviate housing supply bottlenecks.

Manufacturing and Industrial Capacity

The global manufacturing landscape continues to be defined by China's expanding influence and the United States' struggle to re-onshore production. BYD's export figures for 2025—over one million vehicles outside China, doubling the previous year—underscore a relentless scale-up. The company's ambition to establish 2,000 dealerships in Europe by the end of 2026 points to a strategic, ground-level penetration of Western markets. This stands in contrast to Sony's decision to split off its TV business into a joint venture with China's TCL, a move that signals the end of an era for a once-dominant Japanese consumer electronics brand in a fiercely competitive sector. The sentiment from a visit to China by philanthropist John Arnold is telling: "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." This captures the core dilemma for Western manufacturers: competing on cost and scale against a system that may prioritize strategic dominance over immediate profitability.

The U.S. response is fraught with contradictions. Efforts to build domestic icebreaking capability have led to a purchase of vessels from Finland, a country that dominates the global design and construction of such specialized ships. This reliance on foreign expertise highlights a gap in domestic industrial capacity. In a more localized legislative attempt, Washington state lawmakers have proposed a bill aimed at curbing 3D-printed "ghost guns," but its broad language could effectively criminalize a wide range of home manufacturing, illustrating the difficulty of regulating emerging technologies. The broader challenge for U.S. manufacturing is detailed in a Financial Times analysis: tariffs, intended to protect domestic industry, have raised costs for U.S. manufacturers who rely on imported components, while goods from places like China often remain cheaper even with added tariffs. Furthermore, even as the U.S. incentivizes semiconductor fabrication plants (fabs) like TSMC's, the equipment manufacturers themselves are moving production offshore. Lam Research, for instance, has shifted high-volume production to Malaysia. This trend of "equipment offshoring" undermines the goal of a fully domestic semiconductor supply chain. A counterpoint is Micron's groundbreaking on a $100 billion DRAM fab in New York, a massive bet on domestic memory chip production, while Utah develops a plan to meet a quarter of U.S. demand for critical minerals.

Energy Systems and Data Center Demand

The insatiable appetite of data centers is reshaping energy and material markets. The EIA's analysis of repurposing retired military aircraft engines as gas turbines for data centers is a fascinating example of adaptive reuse. While theoretically capable of adding 40,000 MW of capacity—equivalent to over 10% of Arizona's current generation—the practical hurdles are significant: the condition of engines retired for over a decade, military needs, and the logistics of removal and installation. This idea reflects a broader search for rapid power solutions to meet data center demand, which is also driving a memory chip shortage so severe it has its own Wikipedia article. JLL's 2026 Global Data Center Outlook projects a doubling of capacity by 2030, a growth rate that strains every supporting system.

In the UK, a resurgence in demand for chimney sweeps highlights how energy security concerns and high prices are driving a return to older, more localized heating methods like wood-burning stoves. This is a microcosm of the tension between centralized, high-tech energy systems and resilient, decentralized alternatives. The philosophical divide in energy policy is articulated by Dan Wang, who contrasts China's "electric tech stack"—a 21st-century approach focused on electric motors and batteries—with the legacy "gas-guzzling" infrastructure. India appears to be following this electrification path. In the U.S., political will is also shifting: the governor of New York wants to add 5 gigawatts of nuclear capacity, and Japan has restarted a reactor at the world's largest nuclear plant, signaling a cautious return to nuclear power after Fukushima.

Infrastructure and Material Constraints

Beyond energy, infrastructure faces its own crises. The rising cost of water in the U.S., which has doubled in real terms since the 1980s despite declining per-capita use, is attributed partly to "unreasonably strict environmental standards." This points to the hidden costs of regulatory compliance and the challenge of maintaining aging systems. Data centers are not only demanding power but also vast quantities of memory chips, contributing to the shortage. The pressure to build data centers quickly has led to proposals for exempting power plants from federal regulation if they don't connect to the main grid, potentially bypassing lengthy interconnection queues. Meanwhile, in Spain, a series of fatal train crashes in a short period raises urgent questions about infrastructure safety and maintenance.

Technology and Insurance-Driven Change

A subtle but powerful theme is the role of insurance as a driver of technological and social change. Historically, insurance companies were key advocates for building codes. Today, insurance startup Lemonade is offering a 50% discount for miles driven using Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD), based on data showing reduced risk during autonomous operation. This creates a direct financial incentive for adopting autonomous technology and raises questions about the insurance models for fully autonomous systems like Waymo. In aerospace, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin launched its Starlink competitor, TeraWave, while in Iran, military-grade GPS jammers have been used to degrade Starlink performance by up to 80%, illustrating the vulnerabilities of satellite internet in conflict zones. In robotics, the debate continues on how human-like robots should be. While legs offer advantages for terrain and lifting, mimicking human joint arrangement may not be optimal. For electric vehicles, battery degradation trends show an average loss of 2.3% per year, with faster degradation linked to fast charging and hot climates. In logistics, drone delivery startup Zipline has raised $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation, having completed over 2 million deliveries, signaling maturation in the sector. Chinese robotaxi companies are expanding in the Middle East ahead of their U.S. counterparts, another front in the global competition for autonomous vehicle deployment.

Miscellaneous

The reading list concludes with notes on "Moon trees" grown from seeds that orbited the Moon, a journey through China's coal country, the availability of Stewart Brand's book on maintenance, and the ability to download 3D models of IKEA furniture. These items, while seemingly disparate, touch on themes of long-term thinking, the legacy of industrial energy systems, the importance of upkeep, and the democratization of design through digital tools.

In sum, this reading list paints a picture of a world grappling with the physical and logistical demands of digitalization, the geopolitical tensions embedded in supply chains, and the slow, complex work of adapting existing systems to new technologies and policies. The signals are mixed: progress in some areas, like housing permitting and drone logistics, is tempered by constraints in manufacturing capacity, infrastructure costs, and the sheer scale of demand from the data economy. The path forward will depend on navigating these interlocking pressures with both innovation and a clear-eyed view of material and institutional realities.