The Navy’s AI bet to fix its submarine bottleneck

The answer to America’s submarine bottleneck, the U.S. Navy has decided, lies as much in software as it does in steel. A new multibillion-dollar facility in Cherokee, Alabama, aims to harness AI and robotics to build submarine components faster and more reliably. The automated “factory of the future” will produce parts for the Navy’s Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines, both central to the U.S. fleet. It will cost $2.4 billion to develop. “This factory is the first of three facilities designed to address the most critical bottlenecks in the maritime industrial base,” said John C. Phelan, secretary of the Navy, in a statement. The bottleneck is significant: a shortage of labor. The project is a major public-private push to revive U.S. submarine manufacturing capacity through heavy automation, says Chris Power, founder and CEO of Hadrian, the company behind the Alabama facility. “In the U.S., just the submarine program alone is 70 million man