Unlimited Industries Tackles America’s Construction Crisis As AI Infrastructure Demands Soar
US construction productivity is stalling as AI demands surge. Unlimited Industries uses AI-led design automation to cut costs and timelines for data centre builds.
American construction productivity has collapsed 30-40% below 1970s levels, bleeding roughly $1 trillion every five years through inefficiency and delays. This decline comes precisely when the country faces unprecedented infrastructure demands: building massive energy and computing systems for artificial intelligence.
Tech giants are announcing plans for 100 gigawatts of new AI infrastructure, requiring trillions in construction spending. Meanwhile, 98% of major infrastructure projects face cost overruns or delays that would make any AI timeline impossible to meet. As AI factories replace traditional data centres, the construction demands become even more complex.
Unlimited Industries, a San Francisco-based construction company, raised $12 million in seed funding to attack this crisis head-on. Their approach represents what may be the only viable path forward: rebuilding America’s construction capacity using AI to automate the design and building process itself.
The Scale of America’s Building Crisis
The regulatory burden that proliferated in the 1970s fragmented the industry into smaller projects and fewer developers, crushing incentives for technological advancement. Projects that should take months now drag on for years.
Compare this to China, which invests 4.8% of GDP in infrastructure versus America’s measly 0.5%. China builds cities the size of New York annually while American projects stall in regulatory purgatory. Meanwhile, Chinese AI firms challenge US tech giants with more efficient approaches to infrastructure development.
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IBM’s CEO recently warned that spending trillions on AI data centres makes no economic sense at today’s infrastructure costs. unless things change, America simply cannot build fast enough or cheap enough to support the computing infrastructure the AI race demands.
A Founder’s Awakening to Construction Dysfunction
Alex Modon discovered this dysfunction firsthand. The multi-disciplinary engineer and repeat founder entered industrial construction expecting the efficiency he’d seen in software development. Instead, he found a system mired in misaligned incentives and manual processes.
‘The traditional construction model is slow, brittle, and fundamentally misaligned,’ Modon said. Projects that should have taken months stretched into years, with each step relying on disconnected tools that made rapid iteration impossible.
This experience sparked the realisation that became Unlimited Industries. ‘Advances in AI mean we can finally build the physical world the way we build software,’ said Modon, who founded the company with former Rupa Health executives Tara Viswanathan and Jordan Stern.
AI-Native Construction in Practice
Unlimited’s platform generates and evaluates hundreds of thousands of design configurations in parallel, automatically identifying optimal layouts before construction begins. On a recent industrial project, this approach cut pre-construction engineering time from six months to just weeks. Another project saw their AI explore tens of thousands of potential configurations, identifying a design that reduced projected capital costs by over 50%.
The company operates as a vertically integrated engineering and construction firm, eliminating the costly handoffs that plague traditional projects. Where conventional firms profit from delays through cost-plus contracts, Unlimited’s model flips the incentives entirely. This aligns with broader trends in smart building automation that are reshaping the construction industry.
Traditional construction treats design as static – once drawings are approved, changes become expensive change orders. Unlimited turns engineering into continuous optimisation, learning from each project to improve the next.
Rebuilding American Industrial Capacity
The $12 million funding round, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and CIV, positions Unlimited within a broader effort to restore American building capability. Katherine Boyle, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, called the company’s approach ‘a fundamental change, turning design and build into a rapid and continuous optimisation problem.’
This fits Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism thesis – backing companies that rebuild critical American industrial capacity. The firm has invested in defence unicorns and infrastructure companies as part of recognising that software alone cannot solve America’s physical world challenges. This movement parallels manufacturing automation advances that are accelerating America’s industrial renaissance.
Unlimited focuses initially on the most critical needs: power infrastructure for data centres, critical minerals processing, and advanced manufacturing projects. They work with customers ranging from century-old public companies to cutting-edge energy startups, all facing the same underlying problem.
What’s at Stake in the Building Race
America needs trillions in new infrastructure this decade – not just for AI, but for energy transition, manufacturing reshoring, and critical mineral processing. The country that dominated global infrastructure development for most of the 20th century now struggles to build basic projects on time and on budget.
The construction productivity gap isn’t just an economic problem – it’s becoming a national security issue as America races to build the physical infrastructure that AI dominance requires. With enterprise AI investment challenges mounting across industries, efficient construction becomes even more critical.
Unlimited Industries represents one approach to closing this gap, using AI to automate the construction process itself. Whether this model can scale fast enough to address America’s infrastructure crisis remains the trillion-dollar question. But with traditional construction failing so completely, radical approaches like Unlimited’s may be the only path back to building abundance.
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