Erin Price-Wright
Erin Price-Wright is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on its American Dynamism team. She invests in companies spanning AI for the physical world, robotics, energy, manufacturing, industrials, and defense. Previously, she was a partner at Index Ventures and held engineering and product roles at Palantir. ([a16z.com](https://a16z.com/author/erin-price-wright/?utm_source=openai))
Defense Demand Is Helping Finance America’s Industrial Rebuild
a16z investors Erin Price-Wright and Connor Love argue that defense demand can help finance factories, suppliers and other industrial capacity whose uses extend into commercial markets such as robotics and energy. They say adaptable production, closer collaboration with suppliers and private capital willing to fund companies before government contracts arrive are making it more feasible to rebuild that capacity. The case, they argue, depends not just on investment or technology, but on companies proving they can build—and on the country choosing to let projects proceed.
Production Capacity Is the Binding Constraint on Defense Growth
At a16z’s American Dynamism Summit, Erin Price-Wright’s conversation with Michael Duffey and Dino Mavrookas recasts the “trillion-dollar” defense question as a production problem. Mavrookas argues that autonomy and software-first design can make new maritime platforms cheaper, simpler, and faster to build, while Duffey says the Pentagon must change acquisition incentives so industry invests in capacity rather than waiting for government-funded expansion. Their shared case is that defense cannot scale without a broader industrial base built around producibility, commercial demand, private capital, and faster procurement.
Critical Minerals and Grid Hardware Are the AI Economy’s Physical Bottlenecks
In an a16z conversation with Erin Price-Wright, former Tesla executives Turner Caldwell and Drew Baglino argue that America’s AI ambitions depend on rebuilding the physical systems beneath them: critical minerals, refining, power electronics, manufacturing and the grid. Caldwell, now CEO of Mariana Minerals, says the US is decades behind China in minerals capacity and must use automation and vertical integration to speed mining and refining. Baglino, CEO of Heron Power, says outdated mechanical grid equipment should be replaced with silicon- and software-based power electronics, backed by durable industrial policy and coordinated infrastructure planning.
Apple Explores Intel and Samsung for U.S. Chip Production
Mark Gurman said Apple has held early talks with Intel and Samsung about using new U.S. fabs to make future A-series and M-series processors, an exploratory move he framed as a supply-chain redundancy question rather than only a political one. Apple still relies heavily on TSMC, primarily in Taiwan, and Gurman described that geographic and supplier concentration as one of the company’s biggest risks. Across the rest of the broadcast, executives and analysts described a similar shift from exposure to execution: AI companies are giving Washington early model access for review, while enterprise adoption is being tested by security, deployment cost and proprietary data advantages.