Designing the Physical World with AI

June 11, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the United States, the average salary of an electrician in Texas is now higher than that of a Silicon Valley software engineer. This surprising fact surfaces a deeper crisis: a nation that is struggling to build. A16Z General Partner Aaron Price Wright hosts two founders who are using AI to reverse the decay of physical construction—at wildly different scales. Alex Bowden, CEO of Unlimited Industries, is automating the design and construction of massive industrial facilities like power plants and data centers. Davide Asnaghi, CEO of Dio Computers, is using AI to design and manufacture custom circuit boards inside the United States, faster and cheaper than Asia. Their shared premise is that AI’s first breakthrough in the physical world is not humanoids folding laundry, but a quiet transformation of how we design and manufacture the stuff we already know how to build.

The Software Mindset for Hardware Problems

Both companies operate on a radical insight: the last frontier standing is not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of data. Foundational AI models have almost no training data on physical design—no "common crawl" for construction blueprints or PCB schematics. The fix, for both founders, is to reframe the problem as code.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **The Vision: Compressing Physical-World Timelines** - The episode opens with the core premise: AI is starting to move atoms, not just bits.
2 (01:51) **Introducing the Guests and the Two Scales** - Host Aaron Price Wright introduces Davide Asnaghi (Dio Computers, micro-scale: circuit boards) and Alex Bowden (Unlimited Industries, macro-scale: construction).
3 (03:05) **Alex: Automating the Pre-Construction "IFC Package"** - Alex explains the current construction process: a year-long, fragmented design phase producing a set of instructions (IFC package) for builders.
4 (04:58) **Alex: The Two Halves of Automation** - The future of construction has two phases: 1) fully automated design (the IFC package) and 2) a site full of robotics (autonomous earth movers, humanoids, drones).
5 (05:20) **Davide: The Two-Year Timeline for PCB Design Automation** - Davide draws a parallel to construction, but for circuit boards. He predicts full automation for a specific subset of electronics design within two years.
6 (06:50) **Davide: The 80/20 Problem in Manufacturing** - Electronics manufacturing is already heavily roboticized (surface mount technology), but the remaining 20% (odd-shaped components, final assembly) is done by hand.
7 (09:06) **Davide: From "Software Engineers as EEs" to "Agents as EEs"** - The goal is to give anything that can generate code (humans and agents) the ability to generate hardware.

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Show Notes

Erin Price-Wright speaks with Alex Modon, cofounder and CEO at Unlimited Industries, and Davide Asnaghi, CEO at Diode Computers, about how AI is moving from software into the physical world. They discuss automating construction and electronics design, using code and simulation to model real-world systems, and how incentives and manufacturing constraints shape adoption. They also examine what it takes to scale infrastructure, reduce build times, and unlock more abundant industrial capacity in the United States.

Resources:

Follow Alex on X: https://x.com/alexmodon

Follow Davide on X: https://x.com/davideasnaghi

Follow Erin on X: https://x.com/espricewright

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