HIRO

Boring Company is about to explode. They just closed about $3B in new funding and they are now aggressively hiring tons of people including business development (sales). This tells me they’ve reached the level of technical maturity they want so they can blitz municipalities worldwide to build Loop projects. We currently know about Las Vegas (12 stations, 8 more by end of year, 104 within a few years), Nashville (40+ stations), and Dubai (20), but other cities are coming. They currently have 7 tunnel boring machines in operation, with an additional 4 more anticipated to be put into service by the end of 2026. They currently build a new machine every two months. Loop is Boring’s big urban transit innovation. It is a hybrid system, allowing EVs to pop out of tunnels and drive on surface streets for a bit. Stations can be small surface parking lots (one of Vegas’ new stations will be at a Mexican restaurant), or be placed beside a hotel’s entrance portico. Small cheap stations mean you can build lots of stations resulting in a design rule of less than 100 feet for customers to walk as opposed to a subway’s 1/4 mile design target. And unlike a subway, Loop is a point-to-point express system. No stopping at intermediate stations along the way or changing train lines in the Loop system. AI? Absolutely. The boring machines are mostly autonomous now and the EVs driving passengers will be autonomous soon. Obviously these systems will eventually tightly integrate into Tesla’s Robotaxi network. Being a Musk company, Boring has wrung tons of cost out of the system, making Boring more than 10x cheaper than legacy tunnel boring. Among other things, this has resulted in both Las Vegas and Nashville systems being completely privately funded through a combination of hotels paying for their own Loop station and rider fees that still cost less than an equivalent (but slower) taxi ride. Any city investigating ways to lighten urban traffic load should be calling up Boring.