Infrastructure

What gets built, and what everything else stands on: next-generation factories, high-voltage lines, data centres, ports, engineering works. The section tells the story of the industrial investment decade under way — gigafactories, chip fabs, energy terminals — with its numbers: capacities, timelines, jobs, megawatts. This is the section of concrete and copper, where progress has a street address.

Its border with “Machines” is simple: here what is BUILT, there what BUILDS. We follow construction sites the world over, with particular attention to those the general press ignores — grid interconnections, materials plants, the infrastructure of countries leapfrogging a technological generation. A project only enters these pages dated, budgeted and sourced.