Hadrian CEO Chris Power on autonomous factories, the US manufacturing deficit, and becoming the 'index of the market'

Summary

Hadrian builds autonomous factories aimed at closing the gap left by decades of US deindustrialization. CEO Chris Power argues the country no longer has a functioning industrial base — the skilled machinist and welder workforce that once ran high-precision manufacturing has aged out, and the capability was largely offshored to China from the 1970s through the 1990s. Hadrian's answer is to build highly automated factories staffed by workers who have never set foot on a factory floor before, made 10x more productive through software and robotics.

The workforce model

Power describes the approach as giving new workers "superpowers" rather than replacing them. He claims 80% of Hadrian's factory processes are now accessible to non-experts — the Ghibli-mode analogy he uses is deliberate: the same way anyone can generate studio-quality animation today, most parts can be produced by someone without deep machining expertise. The remaining 20% still requires specialist knowledge.

The software stack is fully proprietary. Off-the-shelf models and CAM programming tools don't work for what Hadrian does, partly because American precision manufacturing is heavily ITAR-regulated, so almost no training data exists publicly. Power says Hadrian is the only company generating a labeled manufacturing dataset in real time, inside the factory, every day — which is why its internal ML models work where generic ones don't.

Factory supply chain vulnerability

Hadrian buys its CNC machines from Germany, South Korea, and Japan — not China, which Power says embeds spyware in its equipment. The US invented the CNC machine through the Air Force but no longer manufactures them domestically. Power flags this as a structural risk: if a major conflict escalates, the US may not be able to source the capital equipment needed to build more factories quickly enough, because allied suppliers would face the same surge demand.

Becoming the index

Hadrian's positioning in the defense supply chain is deliberately platform-like. Power describes it as becoming "the index of the market" — manufacturing parts for a wide enough range of customers that individual program delays don't move the needle. Core business is growing roughly 10x year-on-year, which he says gives Hadrian the buffer to absorb the long continuing resolution cycles that are squeezing single-program defense startups. The AWS-versus-Netflix analogy is his: it doesn't matter which streaming service wins, because everyone runs on AWS.

For newer entrants, Hadrian is increasingly acting as a co-prime — the DoD, in Power's account, is actively directing defense startups to partner with Hadrian to build out their production capacity rather than trying to stand up manufacturing independently.

The MBA rollup question

Power is skeptical of the trend of buying legacy machine shops. His objection isn't just cultural — though he notes that no master machinist will take direction from a Harvard MBA in a suit — it's structural. Capital equipment in naval facilities and machine shops dates from the 1950s to the 1980s, most of it pre-digital, and retrofitting automation onto machines with no computers is close to impossible. Building from scratch with modern tooling and a new workforce is the only path that makes economic sense.

International expansion

Hadrian has no near-term plans to expand outside the US. Power says the domestic backlog — fixing Navy manufacturing, scaling munitions production, supporting defense startup customers — is large enough to keep the company occupied for at least another year or two. Europe and allied partners in the Middle East and Japan face the same skilled-labor erosion problem, and Power sees eventual opportunity there, but it isn't the current priority.