Florida's El Segundo and the Semiconductor Renaissance

How a 500-acre technology district in Central Florida could become a new engine of American innovation.

Full disclosure: I live in Florida, and I already have a NeoCities website. So naturally, I consider myself uniquely qualified to discuss NeoCity's future.

The fact that NeoCity and NeoCities have absolutely nothing to do with each other is a minor administrative detail.

But jokes aside, something genuinely interesting is happening in Central Florida. And the more I look at it, the more I'm reminded of El Segundo, California.

If you're not familiar with El Segundo, it's one of America's great concentrations of aerospace, defense, advanced engineering, and increasingly, hard-tech startups. It's the kind of place where someone can leave an aerospace company, start a business in a garage, recruit three engineers from down the street, and potentially build something that ends up in orbit.

That kind of ecosystem doesn't happen overnight. But Florida may be planting the seeds of something similar. And for those of us living here, that's a pretty exciting prospect.

Welcome to NeoCity

In Osceola County, just outside Kissimmee, there's a roughly 500-acre technology district called NeoCity.

Unlike the typical technology park filled with office buildings, coffee shops, and startups developing yet another subscription service, NeoCity is focused on something we've spent decades allowing to migrate overseas.

Actually making things.

Semiconductors. Advanced packaging. Specialized electronics. Materials science. The physical technologies that make modern computing possible.

And the investment is becoming substantial. South Korea's ELSPES has announced plans for a $470 million semiconductor manufacturing investment, with more than 600 projected jobs.

SkyWater Technology has an established semiconductor manufacturing presence. BRIDG and imec are involved in advanced research and commercialization. The Florida Semiconductor Engine is helping connect the region's universities, manufacturers, and emerging businesses.

These aren't all completed projects, and some investments will unfold over years. But they're evidence of an industrial ecosystem taking shape. And potentially something much bigger than a semiconductor manufacturing hub.

The Semiconductor Renaissance

Here's the part that should get everyone's attention.

In 1990, the United States accounted for roughly 37% of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity. By 2022, that number had fallen to about 10%.

We didn't stop inventing things. We just became increasingly comfortable letting somebody else manufacture them. That arrangement worked reasonably well until supply-chain disruptions, geopolitical tensions, and an explosion in demand for computing power reminded everyone that physical infrastructure still matters.

And then AI showed up.

Suddenly, semiconductors weren't just components inside computers. They became strategic infrastructure. The conversation expanded beyond who could develop the best model to who could manufacture the chips, package the processors, power the data centers, and secure the supply chains. We're rediscovering something remarkably obvious.

You can't build a sovereign digital future on a physical infrastructure you don't control.

From El Segundo to Bell Labs

El Segundo didn't become an aerospace powerhouse because someone put up a sign announcing an innovation district. It happened through decades of accumulated engineering expertise, government investment, industrial infrastructure, defense contracts, and entrepreneurs building on what came before them.

The magic isn't any one company. It's the proximity.

Engineers, manufacturers, researchers, investors, and customers working within the same ecosystem create opportunities that would be much harder to coordinate from opposite sides of the planet. But there's another historical comparison worth considering. Bell Labs.

At its height, Bell Labs brought together physicists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and researchers from disciplines that didn't always have obvious reasons to collaborate. The result wasn't just better telecommunications. It was the transistor, foundational work in information theory, Unix, and an extraordinary collection of innovations that helped shape modern computing.

The interesting part wasn't simply having brilliant people in the same building. It was creating an environment where ideas could move between disciplines, where fundamental research could become practical engineering, and where discoveries in one field could unlock possibilities in another.

Now imagine that kind of environment with modern AI accelerating the process. A materials scientist working alongside a semiconductor engineer. A robotics startup collaborating with a packaging specialist. An AI researcher discovering an application for a manufacturing process that wasn't originally designed for artificial intelligence.

The real opportunity isn't just making better chips. It's creating the conditions for discoveries nobody thought to put on the roadmap.

NeoCity isn't Bell Labs, and there's no guarantee it will develop anything resembling that culture. But the possibility of building a multidisciplinary innovation ecosystem around real manufacturing capabilities is considerably more exciting than simply announcing another industrial park.

AI Is Getting Physical

We've watched AI become progressively more capable. Models got bigger. Inference got cheaper. Software development accelerated. Entire categories of applications started looking suspiciously like temporary interfaces wrapped around intelligence. But underneath all that software is an enormous physical dependency.

Silicon. Memory. Packaging. Power electronics. Cooling. Electricity. Networking. And increasingly, specialized hardware designed to bring intelligence closer to where it's actually needed. Robotics. Industrial automation. Autonomous systems. Medical equipment. Defense applications. Edge inference.

We've talked quite a bit about bringing AI down from massive cloud infrastructure and into smaller, more efficient, locally controlled systems.

That transition doesn't eliminate the need for sophisticated hardware. It increases it. And this is where NeoCity becomes especially interesting. Its focus on advanced packaging, heterogeneous integration, and specialty semiconductor manufacturing could be relevant to the next generation of intelligent devices. Not necessarily the next giant GPU competing with NVIDIA, but the thousands of specialized components and systems that will make AI useful throughout the physical world.

And with AI increasingly capable of connecting knowledge across disciplines, the innovation cycle itself could accelerate. We're not just talking about faster manufacturing.

We're talking about potentially shortening the distance between an idea, a working prototype, and a commercially viable product.

Florida's Opportunity

Florida already has significant aerospace, defense, aviation, research, and technology activity.

The Space Coast is practically synonymous with America's modern commercial space industry. Orlando has substantial simulation, defense, and engineering expertise. Universities across the state contribute research and technical talent.

NeoCity adds another piece to that picture. And the Florida Semiconductor Engine is thinking regionally, connecting institutions and businesses across a 23-county area rather than limiting the effort to one industrial campus.

That's an important distinction. The opportunity isn't simply to attract a few semiconductor factories. It's to create an environment where manufacturing, research, capital, and entrepreneurship reinforce each other. And personally, I find that especially interesting because it's happening right here in Florida.

We spend a lot of time discussing technological breakthroughs coming out of Silicon Valley, research labs, and industrial centers scattered around the world. There's something appealing about the possibility that the next generation of American hardware innovation could be happening a few hours up the road.

Of course, announcements aren't factories. Projected jobs aren't employees. And public funding doesn't automatically produce a thriving startup ecosystem. NeoCity still has to prove that it can translate its infrastructure and institutional relationships into sustained commercial activity. But the ingredients are becoming increasingly interesting.

The Next Industrial Revolution Might Look Familiar

There's something almost amusing about the direction technology is taking us. We've spent decades moving everything into software, abstracting away hardware, and treating physical infrastructure as somebody else's problem.

Now the most advanced technology on the planet is forcing us to rediscover the importance of manufacturing. The AI revolution may be digital, but its foundations are decidedly physical.

Factories. Materials. Semiconductors. Electricity. Engineers. The same fundamental ingredients that built America's earlier industrial and technological revolutions, now supporting an entirely new generation of intelligent machines.

So is NeoCity Florida's El Segundo?

Not yet. And could it eventually foster something reminiscent of Bell Labs, where different disciplines collide and innovation becomes almost an inevitable byproduct of proximity?

That's the possibility I find even more interesting. Because the next great American technology cluster might not emerge around another social media platform or software subscription. It might emerge around people who know how to make things, people who know how to think differently, and increasingly, intelligent systems helping them do both.

That would be a renaissance worth watching. And maybe participating in.

In fact, given my extensive NeoCities experience, I just hope nobody at Osceola County acts surprised when I show up expecting my office space.

---

Rich Washburn is a technologist, strategist, and Founder & Chief AI Architect of ARIA AI Labs, working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, communications, and capital. He also serves as Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.