Joe Lonsdale: We looked at the future of warfare and it was obvious where things were going — drones everywhere. And it just isn’t sustainable to fire million-dollar missiles at cheap drones. That math doesn’t work. So we asked: how do you get a one-to-many effect? The answer wasn’t more missiles — it was energy.
The breakthrough came when Silicon Valley chips got fast and powerful enough to control massive energy on microscopic time scales. You can condense huge amounts of power into a fraction of a second, send it into a gallium nitride emitter, and fire farther than anyone thought possible. That’s when everything changed.
Missiles versus drones is a losing game. You’re spending $100,000 to shoot down something that costs a fraction of that. The future is shooting cones of energy — fast, efficient, precise — and taking out multiple threats without bankrupting yourself.
Gallium nitride — GaN — is the unsung hero here. It’s an insanely efficient emitter that’s only really become viable in the last 10–15 years. Pair that with modern AI chips, and suddenly you can deliver a burst of energy so intense and so fast that it fries drone electronics instantly.
You’re not slowly melting targets. You’re condensing power into a 10,000th of a second or less. A super-fast, super-intense burst. When it hits the drone’s electronics, it doesn’t damage them — it destroys them.
The key insight was realizing that Silicon Valley’s best engineers and chips could solve defense problems in totally new ways. When you combine cutting-edge AI hardware with advanced emitters like gallium nitride, you don’t just improve weapons — you redefine how warfare works.
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