Silicon Valley-backed California city project pitches plan for manufacturing hub
Speaking at the Reindustrialize summit in Detroit, Jan Sramek called the proposal the 'Solano Foundry'. The 2,100-acre site would be located on the more than 65,000 acres in Solano county that the tech billionaires began purchasing in 2017 but have yet to develop.
'It's time to bring back 'designed in California, made in California',' Sramek wrote in a social media post announcing the plan. 'Silicon Valley earned its name because chips were once made here alongside code. By bringing R&D and manufacturing back together, Solano Foundry restores that magic, in a new home for frontier tech. California is back.'
In early 2024 – after the New York Times revealed that tech billionaires such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Michael Moritz were behind California Forever – the group submitted a ballot initiative that would have asked voters to approve their building a new city on the land. Soon after, they withdrew the initiative, deciding to instead seek approval through the county's standard processes for negotiating and executing a development agreement.
Then, this March, the group announced that it planned to build a shipbuilding hub on the land it had acquired near the Sacramento River, which feeds into the San Francisco Bay. Soon after, Donald Trump signed an anticipated executive order to revitalize the shipbuilding industry in the US.
The 'Solano Foundry' would similarly appeal to Trump's desires to revitalize American industry.
Sramek echoed the president's language in his social media post. 'Silicon Valley made its name in hardware,' he wrote. 'But we offshored to China, and broke that model. And now it's Shenzhen and Guangzhou that lead drones and robotics.'
Andreas Lieber, the Foundry's general manager, told KQED the plan will rebuild the middle class by bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. 'You cannot really operate as a country if you're only doing service jobs and basically outsource your middle class,' he said. 'And then you're not building anything anymore.'
A white paper that California Forever published, in collaboration with real estate company JLL, predicts that the Foundry will 'create at least 35,000 manufacturing jobs and 5,000 warehousing jobs'. It also featured quotes supporting the project from powerful voices in Silicon Valley.
'California Forever's approach for their Solano Foundry is not the California I know, but it's the California I want to know,' said former Intel executive Bob Swan.
Solano county residents are more skeptical.
'There are sites that can accommodate industries such as this that do not require… the development of an entire new community to make this happen,' Nate Huntington of Solano Together, a coalition of community members opposed to the project, told KQED. 'Many of the things that they put out [are] to create hype and potential attraction to this project, but some of those things fade.'
In his social media post, Sramek toted the community tech billionaires hope to build alongside the Foundry: 'To actually re-industrialize, we need industrial ecosystems, where R&D, production, and training are located within amazing places to live.' Located '40mins from Napa, 2.5 hours from Tahoe,' he added, the city will have capacity for more than 175,000 new homes.
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