In 2023, the California Forever group, a company backed by a gaggle of Bay Area billionaires, announced that it wanted to use some 60,000 acres of Solano County farmland north of San Francisco to develop a brand new city. The effort was pretty much an unmitigated disaster from start to finish, and the group eventually rescinded its plans. Now, however, the same group says that it has a new project that may be significantly easier to accomplish.
In a blog post made to its website last week, the California Forever group unveiled a new proposal for what it calls “the Solano Foundry”—a planned industrial park, centered around a large manufacturing plant, that the group describes as a “new home for frontier tech, an hour north of Silicon Valley.” The “Foundry” would be quite large, residing on 2,100 acres and covering some 40 million square feet, the group says. The industrial hub could act as a hub for “advanced transportation, robotics, energy, and defense,” the site says. You can see the plans for the project here.
“Silicon Valley earned its name because chips were once made here alongside code,” said Jan Sramek, Founder & CEO of California Forever. “The Solano Foundry restores that formula. By bringing R&D and manufacturing back together, we’ll outpace global competitors, streamline supply chains, and ignite a new era where products are both designed and made in California.”…