Bay Minette Rolls Its First Coil

Happy Thursday.

The build this week: America's first new aluminum recycling and rolling plant in more than 40 years has made its first coil. Novelis built the $5 billion plant in Bay Minette, Alabama, to take in more than 15 billion used cans a year, and it expects to employ up to 1,000 people there.

Underneath: Google agreed to fund 890 megawatts of upgrades at Constellation's reactors, the Pentagon offered Wolfspeed a conditional loan of up to $1.5 billion, Anduril won an Army deal worth up to $1.8 billion, and Type One Energy raised $200 million to build fusion machines in Tennessee.

The Lead

The big picture: Every beverage can starts as a coil of aluminum sheet, and Novelis says North America is short on the mills that roll it. Its answer is to put the recycling and the rolling on one site, so used cans melt down into new slabs and roll back out as sheet for can makers and automakers.

Driving the news: On Wednesday Novelis said it has produced the first coil on the cold mill at its $5 billion plant in Bay Minette, in Baldwin County, Alabama. The company calls it the first fully integrated aluminum recycling and rolling plant built in the U.S. in more than 40 years. At full speed it will add 600,000 metric tons of rolled aluminum a year, fed by a recycling center that can take in more than 15 billion used beverage cans a year.

Why it matters: Baldwin County has been building toward this day since 2022, when Novelis announced a plant of more than $2.5 billion on the county's 3,000-acre megasite. The budget roughly doubled along the way, and the company still expects up to 1,000 people to run the plant once it is fully operating. Novelis built it mainly to serve the growing beverage-can market and to supply automakers too, which puts Bay Minette in the supply chain for cans and cars alike.

What's next: The first coil is a commissioning milestone. Novelis is still bringing up the equipment it needs for commercial shipments, and customers are qualifying the metal, a step can makers and automakers require before new sheet runs on their lines. The company expects commercial shipments to begin in the second quarter of 2027. Once it is running, used cans will go in one end of the site and new sheet will ship out the other.

Read Novelis's announcement.

See the 2022 plan for Baldwin County.

Defense & Space

• Anduril won an Army contract worth up to $1.8 billion over five years to build the data layer for the Army's next command-and-control system, with a $162.8 million base period that starts with I Corps in the Pacific.

• The Army handed out about $93.6 million in first-year awards to nine companies, including General Dynamics Mission Systems, Onebrief and Rune Technologies, to build the apps that will run on that same system.

• X-Bow Systems won a Navy prototype agreement worth up to $69.7 million to develop a booster for a future Navy missile and tool up a line in Luling, Texas, that can make up to 500 motors a year.

• BAE Systems will build electronic warfare systems for F-35 Lots 20 through 22 for Lockheed Martin at its New Hampshire and Austin, Texas, plants, after shipping more than 1,500 units so far.

• B&A opened a 45,000-square-foot facility in Madison, Alabama for design, prototyping, testing and systems integration work for defense, intelligence and space customers in the Huntsville area.

Maritime & Shipbuilding

• TOTE Services finalized its contract to manage construction of the Missile Defense Agency's new tracking ships with Hanwha Philly Shipyard building the first one, due in 2030, on a hull adapted from the yard's maritime academy training ships.

• Norfolk Naval Shipyard graduated 140 apprentices from its four-year program at a ceremony Tuesday, with Tidewater Community College among the partners that train them.

• HII brought Incat Crowther's Louisiana design team onto its ROMULUS drone boat program as the Navy's medium unmanned surface vessel moves from autonomy trials toward construction at regional shipyards.

Semiconductors & Electronics

• Wolfspeed received a conditional Pentagon loan commitment of up to $1.5 billion over 30 years to expand U.S. production of silicon carbide and gallium nitride, chip materials used in defense communications and electronic warfare, at its sites in North Carolina, New York and Arkansas.

• Draper broke ground on a 111,000-square-foot microelectronics center in Lowell, Massachusetts, where it expects to add more than 100 jobs designing, building and packaging chips for defense systems when the building opens in 2029.

• DARPA moved IBM, IonQ, Atom Computing and Diraq into the final stage of its quantum computing benchmark, with ceilings of up to $300 million each for IonQ of College Park, Maryland, Atom Computing of Boulder, Colorado, and Diraq.

• Xanadu signed a multi-year partnership with GlobalFoundries to move its photonic quantum components from lab prototypes to volume production on GF's 300-millimeter line in Malta, New York.

• Applied Materials and Intel agreed to develop next-generation transistors and 3D chip stacking together at Applied's new EPIC Center in Silicon Valley and Intel's research campus in Hillsboro, Oregon.

Manufacturing & Automation

• Polyethics Industries will invest more than $41 million in its first U.S. plant in Antwerp, Ohio, hiring 250 people to make plastic bags in a 155,000-square-foot building with help from a JobsOhio grant.

• Re:Build Manufacturing will spend about $20 million on a 130,000-square-foot plant in Rock Hill, South Carolina, adding about 150 jobs building parts for aerospace, defense, energy and robotics customers.

• Bell & Evans will invest $152 million to expand its poultry plant in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, adding at least 382 jobs over three years.

• Methode Electronics is moving its headquarters from Chicago to Southfield, Michigan, where it plans to create at least 90 new jobs by 2030, starting at $29.41 an hour.

Energy & Materials

• Constellation signed a 20-year deal with Google to add 890 megawatts at 11 existing reactors in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, a $4.3 billion investment that should create about 7,200 construction jobs, with the first uprate online by 2028.

• TOYO Solar finished expanding its Humble, Texas, module plant to 2 gigawatts and expects to finish a solar cell line there in the first quarter of 2028.

• Titan Mining signed a term sheet with the Army for a proposed graphite processing plant for battery materials on about 97 acres at Anniston Army Depot in Alabama, with the Army getting the first right to buy up to 10% of uncommitted output.

• Doral Renewables is bringing the last 900 megawatts of its Mammoth Solar complex online in Pulaski County, Indiana, after an 18-month build that put about 1,800 workers on site at its peak.

• Aclara Resources added yttrium, gadolinium and samarium to its planned rare earth separation plant in Louisiana, which already holds its air permit and is targeting a groundbreaking in the first quarter of 2027, subject to financing.

• Bechtel created a nuclear workforce fund at the University of South Carolina to help train skilled trades for nuclear construction.

Supply Chain & Freight

• TA Services bought two cross-border carriers in El Paso, adding 133 trucks and about 550,000 square feet of warehousing to its operations at two of the main U.S.-Mexico gateways.

• The Port of Savannah set a September record of about 504,000 twenty-foot container units, up 3.7% from a year earlier.

• U.S. railroads moved 5.1% more traffic in the week ending Oct. 3, led by a 7.4% jump in intermodal and 12.8% more carloads of metallic ores and metals.

• Radiant Logistics bought Whitacre Logistics' Dallas brokerage to add rail and truck brokerage for building-materials, manufacturing and packaging shippers.

Dealbook

• Type One Energy raised $200 million led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Clutterbuck Capital to build fusion machines at TVA's Bull Run site in Tennessee, aiming at a 400-megawatt plant by 2034.

• LS Power closed a $6 billion fund, $2 billion over target, with about $1.7 billion committed to buying gas plants from Constellation that would form a 5-gigawatt platform in the mid-Atlantic and Texas.

• Parallel Systems raised more than $100 million led by AVP to build its battery-electric autonomous rail cars, which are running in a pilot in Georgia with short-line operator Genesee & Wyoming.

• Vinci4D raised $250 million at a $1.5 billion valuation for software that simulates heat in chips and memory, with AMD Ventures joining the round.

• Stryten Energy secured a $650 million term loan led by Silver Point to support its purchase of C&D Trojan, giving the combined battery maker 18 manufacturing and component sites.

• Multiply Labs raised $75 million, with AstraZeneca and Teradyne among its backers, to build robot clusters that make cell and gene therapies.

• Mecka AI raised $60 million led by Sequoia to collect the human motion data used to train humanoid robots.

• Furientis raised a $25 million seed round led by Benchmark to mass-produce low-cost missile interceptors in Los Angeles, with a goal of 1,000 a year from each factory.

• Aventra raised $17.5 million to expand production of its balloon-launched Piranha precision payload in Herndon, Virginia.

• Bloom raised $3.6 million in Detroit for a marketplace that connects mobility, drone and robotics companies with U.S. contract manufacturers.

Back Tuesday.