Hill and Valley Forum 2025: AVC's Zach White on defense tech, robotics, and the rise of DC-Silicon Valley ties
May 1, 2025 with Zach White
Key Points
- Hill and Valley Forum 2025 drew roughly 10 times more attendees than prior years, signaling defense tech has shifted from contrarian to mainstream among Silicon Valley investors.
- Robotics firms are generating massive training data volumes that will require dedicated compute infrastructure within five years, potentially creating Nvidia's next major demand driver after LLMs.
- Defense founders pitching at industry events must target specific budget holders and program-of-record owners rather than attending for general exposure, as the field has professionalized.
Summary
Defense tech investing has quietly gone mainstream. Zach White, a defense-focused investor at AVC, says Hill and Valley Forum 2025 drew roughly 10 times more attendees than prior years — a signal of how quickly the Silicon Valley-Washington relationship has shifted from fringe to fashionable.
Jensen and reindustrialization
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was the standout speaker for White, who highlighted Huang's push to onshore semiconductor manufacturing and reduce U.S. dependence on China. TSMC is investing heavily in Arizona, and the logic White sketches is straightforward: if Nvidia routes demand through U.S.-based TSMC fabs, packaged with Foxconn domestically, the manufacturing ecosystem follows. The open question White raises is whether Huang is a genuine reindustrializer or primarily a customer of the trend — Nvidia designs chips but doesn't manufacture them, so its influence over physical job creation is indirect at best.
Huang's framing on labor was blunt: some jobs will be created, some will disappear, and every remaining job will change.
Robotics and the missing data center
White flags a gap in the robotics investment narrative. Robots are generating large volumes of training data, and at some point that data needs to be processed at scale — the same infrastructure build-out that defined the LLM wave. Boston Dynamics and Physical Intelligence are not yet talking publicly about dedicated compute infrastructure, but White believes it's coming, with Huang putting a roughly five-year timeline on it. If that build-out materializes, it could be Nvidia's next major demand driver after LLMs.
Who actually executes that build-out matters enormously. White argues it will require tens of billions in capital, which narrows the field to a very small number of founders who can raise at that scale. He names Brett Adcock as a credible candidate, and floats Adam Neumann as another, while noting the list is short.
Defense tech goes mainstream
For founders looking to engage at events like Hill and Valley, White's advice is direct: do your homework before you arrive. Know who controls the programs of record, who the actual budget holders are, and approach them with specificity. Showing up to absorb the vibe is not enough.
The broader signal White takes from the event is cultural. Defense tech investing was a contrarian, almost heretical position a few years ago. Now it draws influencers, generals, and G550s in equal measure. That normalization prompts the next-order question at AVC: if defense is no longer contrarian, what is?