In his 1986 book “Engines of Creation,” engineer K. Eric Drexler — often called the godfather of nanotechnology — made a prediction.
“The coming era of molecular machines will mean the end of many limits: the limit of scarcity, the limit of slow development, the limit of ignorance enforced by the lack of tools,” he wrote.
Reading those words a few years later, when he was 16, Matthew Putman started thinking.
“Our bodies work as these little micro-machines where you have ribosomes and enzymes and things that are working and replicating and making things all the time, but our factories work the way that they’ve worked for the last hundred years,” Putman told Business Insider he thought at the time.
He wondered how a world would look “where you don’t have large assembly lines, you don’t have smokestacks, you instead just make things so perfectly,” he said. Putman became fascinated by the possibilities of machines that are “atomically precise.”
It wasn’t until the recent AI boom, however, that the idea really took off with fabrication plants.
Putman, now 50, is the CEO of Brooklyn-based Nanotronics, which he cofounded with his father in 2010. The company started out building microscopes and tools to detect defects in semiconductors, among other materials. Now, it builds small, modular semiconductor manufacturing plants called Cubefabs.
While the biggest fabs in the country are often millions of square feet in size, Cubefabs measure anywhere from 25,000 square feet for the smallest units up to about 60,000 square feet for a full-sized fab. They’re adaptable, and the company says they can be assembled in under a year in most places on Earth.
They’re also smart — thanks to the power of AI — so they can self-monitor their production and improve in real time, the company said. And they’re relatively cheap, costing a minimum of $30 to $40 million, compared to large fabs that can cost billions to build.
With President Donald Trump back in the White House and pledging to reinvigorate US manufacturing, a new opening has emerged for Nanotronics — even as sweeping tariffs challenge companies that produce or depend on semiconductors.
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Putman says that in the long term, the tariffs will bolster domestic innovation.
Tariffs “should be a wake-up call — a push to create something better than what either the US or China has done before,” he told BI in a video interview from the Nanotronics headquarters in Brooklyn Navy Yard. “If we get this right, American innovation won’t just protect our future — it could help redefine global progress in a way that benefits humanity.”
Putman says compact, modular factories are exactly that.
“Your factory should be incredibly small,” Putman said, gesturing to the room behind him. “Eventually, it could be the size of this room.”
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The ‘Ikea of factories’
Semiconductor manufacturing has surged since the launch of ChatGPT. Global annual revenue for the industry is expected to reach more than $1 trillion by 2030, according to McKinsey & Company.
In the US, despite legislation subsidizing domestic semiconductor production, fabs are more expensive to construct and maintain than those built in places like mainland China and Taiwan, McKinsey says. The US also suffers from a shortage of qualified labor, which can delay construction timelines, according to the firm.
To attempt to solve some of these issues, Nanotronics teamed up with architecture firm Rogers Partners and engineering firm Arup to design compact factories. Each one runs with 37 people, but Putman says the ideal setup is four factories — about 180 workers total — which allows them to scale up without halting production.
“It’s like the Ikea of factories,” Putman said. The company has raised $182 million to date from firms including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
Cubefabs can be used to produce chips that span a range of uses across electronics applications, electric vehicles, and photodetectors for cube satellites, Putman said.
“The more precise we make things, the more abundance we bring to the world,” he said. “The business of making things grow bigger and bigger starts small — molecular small.”
Building on the foundational research of scientist Philippe Bove — now chief scientist at Nanotronics — the company also uses gallium oxide — a type of semiconductor that can handle more power than traditional materials like silicon — to produce advanced chips.
The company plans to have its first installation set up in New York within the next 18 months.
“These fabs do not require billions in capital expenditure or large populations of highly trained workers,” Putman told BI in a follow-up email. “The vision is that any region — whether in the Global South or the United States — should be able to produce what it needs locally.”
