A startup named its factory after a Neal Stephenson novel and raised $250M

In Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel The Diamond Age, a matter compiler is a household appliance that assembles objects atom by atom. Jeff Holden, the Amazon veteran who helped build Prime and later became Uber's first chief product officer, has spent six years in stealth building something with the same name.

His company, Atomic Machines, came out of hiding on October 7 with $250 million raised from investors including Gigafund, XTX Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, OneIM and the Regents of the University of California. It hasn't disclosed a valuation.

The Matter Compiler is a manufacturing system meant to build three-dimensional micro-machines with moving parts, several materials and features down to single-digit microns. AI measures and corrects each fabrication step as it happens, and the system runs its own experiments on its own hardware to check what the simulations predict. The idea is that making hardware should work like compiling software.

First target: the power bill

The first product is less science fiction. The PrimeSwitch PS-150 is an electromechanical relay for power distribution inside AI data centers. The company says it opens in about 50 microseconds, roughly a thousand times faster than a conventional contactor. For now that figure comes from Atomic Machines alone, with no third-party benchmark published.

It's a sensible place to start. Data centers are starved for power and will pay for anything that helps them use it. The harder question, as Glitchwire put it, is whether the Matter Compiler can turn out a second kind of device as easily as the first. A compiler that only ever compiles one program is just a factory.

Sources: Business Wire, Startup Fortune, Glitchwire.