California Sets the Pace of U.S. Reshoring

Domestic execution doesn’t scale fast and inevitably becomes transatlantic!

1. California as the Decision Engine of U.S. Reshoring

U.S. reshoring is not driven by industrial nostalgia. And it is not about job creation.
It exists because today there is a race. A race for control over the industrial systems that make advanced AI possible.

The promised prize is AGI. Like the Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones, AGI represents an absolute, almost divine technological threshold — and a final weapon.

The system only holds if AI is put to work in the physical world.
Industrial production. Robots. Automation. From factories to burgers.

This is where the fracture opens.
The United States no longer has deep manufacturing capacity.
Not anymore.

The decline was not inevitable. It was a choice, made when systemic competition did not yet exist. Today, continuing to enrich actors competing on the same technological and geopolitical plane is no longer a strategy. It is a vulnerability.

Reshoring begins when the supply chain stops being a logistical concern and becomes power. When production, technology, and economic sovereignty realign.

These decisions are not geographically distributed.
They concentrate where competitive urgency is felt, where large pools of capital move, and where access to decisive technologies exists.

That place is California.
This is where pace is set. Where risk is accepted. Where priorities are defined and the rest of the system is forced to follow. California never needed to manufacture everything itself. Its role has always been orchestration. And today, industrial orchestration is central again.

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2. Why Reshoring Breaks at Execution Speed

Global competition has removed the luxury of choosing the pace. Every meaningful advance — AI, robotics, energy, dual-use systems — forces continuous acceleration. Those who slow down fall out of the race. But faster decisions do not translate into faster execution.

Policies, incentives, and announcements accelerate intent. They do not create capacity. Reshoring breaks on industrial time: missing workforce, hollowed supply chains, skills that take years to rebuild.

Chicago is a useful counterexample for understanding where execution stalls. Even the largest American city between the coasts — once an industrial epicenter — failed to evolve in time. Robotics exists there, but mostly as pilot programs, sector-specific deployments, and local experimentation.

The reasons are evident. Venture capital remains marginal (2% of the U.S. total), talent migrates toward more concentrated ecosystems, and industrialization depends on unstable political conditions. Ambition was not missing. What was missing — for decades — was a decision center able to authorize and sustain risk continuously. The result was intermittent cycles: short bursts of enthusiasm, promises of acceleration, followed by long silences. Execution fragments. The system fails to scale.

Why California functions as a decision center while Chicago does not is self-evident. What gets decided around Palo Alto has global impact — not only on social platforms, SaaS, or cloud infrastructure, but on physical decisions: where to open a data center, a factory, a power plant. Especially when those facilities are the ones no one wants in their own backyard.

Reshoring does not work by delegation.
Either you do it where decisions are made, or you don’t participate. Or worse, you absorb the consequences.

Throughout my career, I have worked in multiple companies where part of management was in the United States and part in Europe or Japan. Different incentive structures, cultures, and personal expectations always created friction. But almost never did these factors alone cause failure. Large organizations tend to survive deep internal disputes.

Failure comes from something subtler: when the head of the organization believes it is in the right place — geographically and pragmatically — and it is not.
I have seen managers convinced they could run a U.S. company remotely, without ever walking its corridors. I have seen teams in San Francisco persuaded they controlled innovation while lacking control over the P&L — and one day during Covid, someone in Tokyo deleted a line in an Excel spreadsheet and dismantled the company. I have seen organizations completely lose direction, launched to bring the Silicon Valley mindset into Europe, and unable to realize when — in practice, and uselessly — they were achieving the opposite.

These are not trivial mistakes.
They are failures to distinguish Darwin from Plato: confusing the realm of ideas with the logic of selection.

California is extraordinary at deciding, prototyping, and financing risk. It is not extraordinary at rebuilding industrial depth at the same speed. When decision velocity exceeds domestic execution capacity, reshoring does not scale.

It stalls.
Not for lack of vision. For lack of time.
This asymmetry is not only a constraint.
It is an opportunity.
But it requires action.

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3. Industrial Culture in the Slow West

Old Europe outsourced far less.
Not because of vision. Not because of strategy.
But due to inertia, structure, and an inability to work across diversity and scale quickly.

Europeans struggle to understand each other: languages, cultures, legal systems, identities. Building collective enterprise in business has always been difficult. Coordinating capital and consensus even more so. Italy represents the extreme case: fragmented, localist, unable to build large, coordinated industrial entities.

Fragmentation is not a virtue.
It is the outcome of having spent decades at the bottom of the class in scaling capacity.

Italians are not social innovators. I am one of them. I value my southern roots, but building large industrial systems requires fewer identity constraints and colder organizational discipline. This limitation prevented the creation of global champions. But it also prevented the complete hollowing-out of the industrial base.

The United States, by contrast, managed to be simultaneously racist, exploitative, and profoundly opportunistic. It worked with anyone who enabled faster growth, building empires — often for others — without being constrained by moral coherence. That is how scale happens.

Today the paradox is clear.

The Slow West arrives late.
But it arrives with something others lost: living industrial culture, existing workforce, continuity between design and factory. Industrial time already paid.

There is an argument for waiting. It sounds reasonable: let the U.S. prove the model works, let costs stabilize, let risks distribute elsewhere. It sounds like prudence. It is attrition. Every quarter of delay is a quarter in which American capital moves faster, supply chains consolidate around California-decided ecosystems, and European capacity shifts from orchestration to supply. Waiting is not hedging. It is accepting growing distance in a system that rewards proximity.

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4. Transatlantic Opportunism

In California today, we build robots for factories that do not yet exist.
We design advanced systems imagining an industry that, domestically, still needs to be rebuilt.

Reshoring becomes transatlantic not by idealism, but by convenience.
This is no longer a values pact. It is mutual exploitation. Opportunistic.

Europe — slower, more regulatory, more structurally rigid — leverages its familiarity with the American counterpart to move a few steps faster than it could on its own. The United States does what it has always done best: use any alliance, capital source, or capability available to grow faster than others.

This is a form of constructive selfishness.
Peter Thiel would smile. And I don’t need to like him to share his intolerance for inaction.

Here in Silicon Valley, value gaps are compressed by purpose and outcome. Not because they are resolved, but because they are not prioritized.
Once in a race, arriving first is what matters. It is under this logic that one of the most diverse and operational societies on the planet was built.

This diversity does not rest on abstract values, but on shared objectives. On things to build. On a continuous flow of decisions, execution, and adaptation.
An unstable balance between Star Trek and Mad Max — far removed from idealizing those who merely observe others’ construction sites.

Everything changes. And change is not optional.

Critical thinking remains a compass. But without action — or without assuming the cost of an operational position — it becomes noise. It produces no advantage.

In this context, Europe faces a structural choice: remain observational, or enter an opportunistic execution dynamic, exploit current asymmetries, and build value now.

I work within this context. Today I work on AI systems at Dgree that power super-yachts and may tomorrow operate in dual-use contexts, and I work with SRI in Menlo Park as Strategic AI & Robotics Partnerships (Italy & EU). A role that includes making European industrial capabilities executable — here, in California.

We need to join forces.
Not for idealism.
For efficiency.

And perhaps to rebuild trust — not through values, but through business.
Far West and Slow West, aligned by execution.