This weekly update highlights major developments in manufacturing and artificial intelligence that are reshaping how factories work around the world.

The most exciting news comes from NVIDIA's GTC conference, where companies showed how agentic AI is moving from experiments to real factory work. At GTC, a major manufacturing customer demonstrated using 47 AI agents working together to handle entire purchasing processes from start to finish. This means AI systems are now doing jobs that used to require many human workers, making factories smarter and faster.

In the United States, two major manufacturing announcements happened this week. First, Lumentum, a company based in San Jose, California, announced it will open a new factory in Greensboro, North Carolina to make special lasers for AI data centers. The facility will start making products in mid-2028 and will create over 400 new jobs for people in the area. The company will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build this manufacturing facility.

Meanwhile, Tesla and SpaceX are working together on a huge project called Terafab, which is supposed to be an AI chip factory in Austin, Texas. This shows how important AI manufacturing has become in the United States.

The big picture is clear: AI is changing manufacturing everywhere. Companies are not just experimenting with AI anymore – they are actually using it in their factories right now. Robots, quality checking systems, and production software are all getting smarter with AI, making products cheaper and better than ever before.