Mike's Newsletter | SPECIAL EDITION: The Feel-Good Technology Issue
Welcome Orthoprenuers!
Every week, we bring you the latest in practice management, marketing, profitability, and next-level ortho techniques so you can work smarter, grow faster, and build the practice you want.
In this issue:
📰 The Feel-Good Technology Issue
🗓️ Plan Your 2026 CE Calendar
🎯 Close More Cases
🐘 Tusk: Live Webinar
✨ Final Thoughts
📰 SPECIAL EDITION: The Feel-Good Technology Issue
Why You Should Be Optimistic About AI
I spend a lot of time in this newsletter talking about AI and technology, and I've covered cybersecurity risks, agents doing things they weren't supposed to do, privacy issues, misalignment and plenty of other "scary" things. We should keep paying attention to those things.
But I am NOT an AI Doomer, and you shouldn't be either!
The AI revolution is here, and I think we should be excited about it. So this week, no scary stories. No prompts either.
I want to spend the entire issue looking at reasons to be optimistic about where technology is taking us.
📈 The AI Boom Is NOT a Bubble
This is not a statement about the stock market. This is a statement about the AI buildout necessary to bring about the data centers and robots that will transform our future.
The scale of AI investment is hard to comprehend. J.P. Morgan estimates that U.S. technology capital spending reached roughly 2% of GDP in 2025. To put that in perspective, relative to the size of the economy at the time, that's about equal to the combined peak-year spending on the Interstate Highway System, Apollo program, Manhattan Project and several major New Deal public-works projects. Combined.
J.P. Morgan estimates that AI-related investment contributed about one-fifth of all GDP growth in the U.S. over the past year.
The Federal Reserve's latest projections put median real GDP growth at 2.4% next year, above its 2.0% longer-run estimate.
And we are still very early in the buildout.
Could some investments prove excessive? Of course. That happens during every major technology buildout.
But zoom out and you can see what is happening: we are simultaneously experiencing an enormous infrastructure investment cycle while deploying technology designed to make people and businesses dramatically more productive.
Every single industry is now using AI for efficiency and innovation. 2026 was the year of the data set. 2027 will be the year of the robot.
I believe we are on track for the biggest economic growth cycle of our lifetimes.
🏗️ It All Starts With Data Centers
There is a lot of backlash against data-center construction right now. Some of the concerns are legitimate, but there is documented evidence of China-linked influence operations attempting to amplify opposition to data centers and AI infrastructure.
But cities and states that simply try to stop the data-center buildout risk being left behind.
New research from the National Association of Realtors found that counties with larger concentrations of data centers tend to have higher household incomes, stronger long-term job growth and higher home values. Economists at the University of Chicago have found positive effects on employment, construction jobs, new businesses, wages, income and local economic activity from data-center growth.
Then look at Loudoun County's data-center numbers, one of the largest data-center markets in the world. Data centers generated about $1.2 billion in local tax revenue in fiscal 2026 - 39% of the county's entire budget - while supporting more than 17,000 direct and indirect jobs. The county says the revenue has helped it repeatedly lower property-tax rates for homeowners.
That doesn't mean every proposed data center belongs everywhere. Counties need to negotiate aggressively, require developers to contribute to grid upgrades and power projects, and make sure energy infrastructure keeps pace.
But here's the part that's really hard to wrap your head around: we are only beginning to build the amount of computing power AI is going to require.
Goldman Sachs now estimates U.S. data-center capacity will reach roughly 64 gigawatts by the end of this year and 90 gigawatts by the end of 2027. That's an enormous amount of new power and infrastructure coming online in a very short period. For perspective, the entire United States currently generates about 500 gigawatts of electricity on average.
SpaceX is planning on an entirely different scale.
In its SEC filing, SpaceX says it expects to begin deploying orbital AI-compute satellites as early as 2028 and ultimately wants enormous interconnected constellations of AI computers in space.
The long-term target is astonishing: SpaceX says it wants the capability to launch 100 gigawatts of new AI computing capacity into orbit every year.
And Musk wants to go much further. SpaceX and Tesla's new Terafab project has a long-term goal of manufacturing enough AI chips to produce one terawatt of new computing capacity every year - 1,000 gigawatts - for data centers, satellites, autonomous vehicles and robots.
Why would anyone need that much computing power?
Because every improvement in AI creates new demand for intelligence. Models reason longer. Agents perform more complicated jobs. Self-driving vehicles have to interpret the world continuously. Eventually millions - perhaps billions - of robots will need AI to see, think and act in the physical world.
SpaceX itself says that more compute is directly translating into better intelligence and faster task completion, while reasoning, agentic and multimodal AI are consuming increasingly large amounts of computation.
So when you see another massive data center going up, don't just see a big building full of computers.
See the infrastructure underneath the next generation of intelligence.
Today's data centers are powering the AI systems we have now. The enormous buildout happening on Earth - and eventually in orbit - will help create the AI and robotics capabilities we're going to have next.
And that is where this issue really begins.
🗓️ Plan Your 2026 CE Calendar
The Sleep & Airway Meeting
Fri, Dec 04 | Arizona Biltmore, LXR Hotels & Resorts
THE MOST UP-TO-DATE CLINICAL INFORMATION ON
SLEEP-DISORDERED BREATHING & AIRWAY.
The Orthopreneurs CE Calendar keeps every major workshop, congress, and study club event in one place — searchable by month, so you can plan your travel and your team's coverage well ahead of time instead of scrambling the week before.
Whether you're chasing CE credits, looking for your next study club, or just want to see what's coming up before you lock in your schedule for the quarter, it's worth a five-minute look every month.
Bookmark the calendar, pick your priorities early, and stop letting CE planning become a last-minute scramble.
⚛️ All That Compute Needs Energy
If data centers are the infrastructure underneath the next generation of intelligence, then the next question is obvious: where does all the power come from?
The explosion in computing demand will require a lot more energy. And that may turn out to be one of the AI boom's greatest side benefits.
Last week, regulators issued the first U.S. construction permit for a BWRX-300 small nuclear modular reactor, clearing the way for TVA's proposed 300-megawatt reactor at Clinch River, Tennessee. A second BWRX-300 project in Texas has already entered the federal construction-review process.
We're also seeing progress on much smaller reactors. In September, Westinghouse's eVinci microreactor reached an important criticality-testing milestone. The commercial design is intended to produce about 5 megawatts of electricity from a reactor small enough to fit on a roughly two-acre site and operate for years between refueling.
These new reactors are increasingly being designed around smaller, standardized systems that can be manufactured and deployed repeatedly rather than treating every nuclear plant like a one-off megaproject.
And it's not just nuclear. We are continuing to improve solar, battery storage, geothermal and potentially fusion.
AI, robotics, electrification and advanced manufacturing are all going to require enormous amounts of reliable electricity. Instead of treating increasing demand as a reason to limit technology, let's use it as a reason to build the energy infrastructure we're going to need for the next 50 years.
More compute means more power. More power means more reactors, transmission, factories, construction, engineering and skilled jobs. The AI boom isn't just building intelligence - it is forcing us to rebuild our physical infrastructure too.
🚜 Autonomous Machines Can Help Us Build More - and Make Dangerous Work Safer
If we want cheaper housing, more factories, more power plants, more roads and more infrastructure, we need to dramatically increase how much the construction industry can produce. The industry is already constrained by labor shortages, cost overruns and long project timelines.
Now imagine autonomous construction equipment moving dirt overnight and operating for longer hours without putting people into dangerous environments. One experienced worker could eventually supervise several autonomous machines instead of physically operating only one.
Bedrock Robotics has already put fully autonomous excavators to work on live commercial construction sites with nobody in the cab, including a Nevada water-treatment facility and major earthmoving projects in Texas. The technology can be added to existing excavators rather than requiring contractors to replace their entire fleets.
Meanwhile, Hitachi Construction Machinery is developing Physical AI that learns directly from skilled excavator operators - studying their controls, camera information and work instructions so machines can learn how experienced humans respond to changing conditions on a construction site.
There is also a major safety benefit. Construction had 1,034 workplace deaths in 2024, more than any other private industry, along with roughly 167,000 reported nonfatal injuries and illnesses. Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction had a workplace fatality rate nearly four times the overall U.S. rate. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics fatality data BLS injury data
Moving people away from excavation, heavy machinery, dangerous heights, unstable terrain, mines and other hazardous environments isn't just about efficiency. Autonomous equipment can save lives.
🌱 The Same Intelligence Is Transforming Agriculture
Construction is just one example of intelligence moving into the physical world. Agriculture is another of my favorites.
Some of the most exciting uses of AI and robotics are happening far away from offices, in the fields of the Heartland.
Solinftec now has more than 100 autonomous robots working across more than 55,000 U.S. acres, where they have individually monitored more than 95 million plants. Instead of treating an entire field the same way, cameras and AI identify individual plants and target treatments where they're needed. The company says its robots have reduced chemical use by an average of 85%. They can even return to a refill station, refill themselves and head back into the field without a farmer making the trip.
Another company, Aigen, just launched a new generation of fully autonomous, solar-powered robots that mechanically remove weeds at the root. No herbicides. No diesel. AI identifies the weeds and four independent robotic arms remove them as the machine moves through the field. Fleets are already operating commercially, with the new version available for the 2027 growing season.
Farmers are also beginning to fight crop disease with light instead of chemicals. Saga Robotics' Thorvald robots drive autonomously through vineyards and strawberry farms at night, using precisely controlled UV-C light to stop powdery mildew. Thorvald is now treating around 2,500 acres of U.S. vineyards and roughly 30% of the UK's tabletop strawberry crop, with Saga reporting pesticide reductions of 70-100% in grape and strawberry operations.
And one of my favorites: AI-controlled (frickin') laser beams are killing weeds one at a time. Carbon Robotics' LaserWeeder uses 42 high-resolution cameras and onboard AI to distinguish crops from weeds, then fires lasers at the weed's growing point. Commercial machines can target more than 5,000 weeds per minute without herbicides and are already being used by more than 100 growers.
This is what technological abundance can look like in the real world: more food with less labor, fewer chemicals, less waste and dramatically more precision. And agriculture is only the beginning.
CLOSE MORE CASES
April 1–3, 2027 | Fairmont Austin
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Tickets are live now — secure your spot before it sells out.
LEARN MORE ABOUT CMC
🚀 Transportation Is Starting to Feel Futuristic Again
Put together better AI, dramatically more compute, better batteries, robotics and increasingly autonomous machines, and transportation starts changing too. For decades, transportation really hasn't changed that much. Cars got better. Airplanes got more efficient. But we still basically drive on roads, fly on conventional airplanes and sit in traffic.
That is suddenly starting to change.
The Hyperloop may be back. Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on a precursor Hyperloop between Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and a trip of less than 30 minutes. It is still only a proposal, but The Boring Company recently raised $3 billion and continues expanding its working tunnel network in Las Vegas. And I would not bet against Elon on anything!
Seagliders are reinventing coastal transportation. REGENT's full-size electric Viceroy recently completed its first human-crewed flight. It leaves the dock like a boat, rises onto hydrofoils and then flies just above the water. The planned Viceroy is designed to carry 12 passengers at 180 mph for roughly 180 miles.
Autonomous trucking is getting very real. Tesla Semi is finally scaling production and Kodiak is installing its AI driving system, cameras, radar and lidar onto commercial trucks so they can operate without a human driver. It already has 35 fully driverless trucks hauling freight in the Permian Basin, with more than 40,000 hours of paid driverless operation, and is preparing to launch driverless long-haul service between Dallas and Houston. IKEA plans to become one of its first driverless long-haul customers.
Air taxis are moving out of the lab and into real-world testing. Joby recently flew its electric air taxi on real-world routes around Dallas-Fort Worth, including flights into DFW Airport, while Archer has been flying city-to-city demonstration routes as it prepares to be the official air taxi provider for the LA28 Olympic Games.
Supersonic passenger travel is coming back. Boom is developing its Overture airliner to carry passengers at roughly twice the speed of today's conventional airliners, and American, United and Japan Airlines have orders or pre-orders. At the same time, the FAA has proposed replacing the more than 50-year-old blanket prohibition on routine civilian supersonic flight over the United States with a modern noise-based standard.
And we're getting closer to literal flying cars. Alef is testing a vehicle designed to drive on ordinary roads and take off vertically. Klein Vision's AirCar transforms from a road-going car into a conventional airplane. Even Tesla is getting into the act: Elon Musk recently teased a Roadster equipped with SpaceX cold-gas thrusters that could briefly lift off or hover, with Tesla's latest demonstration now scheduled for October 15.
Put all of this together and transportation suddenly looks exciting again: autonomous cars and trucks, electric semis, air taxis, flying cars, seagliders, underground Hyperloops and supersonic aircraft.
Not every one of these technologies will succeed exactly as envisioned. They don't have to. The bigger point is that we are experimenting again. We are using AI, robotics, new energy systems and new materials to rethink how people and goods move through the world.
🧬 And Maybe the Biggest Payoff Is Discovery
All of that compute can run robots, cars and machines. But it can also think. And perhaps the most exciting use of exponentially increasing intelligence is applying it to problems that humans have struggled with for decades.
Google DeepMind's AlphaGenome Atlas has precomputed predictions for the effects of essentially all 9 billion possible single-letter changes in the human genome, giving researchers an extraordinary new tool for understanding which genetic mutations may contribute to disease.
Anthropic recently put roughly 950 Claude agents to work searching more than 200,000 proteins. They identified a previously uncharacterized enzyme system, and human scientists then tested the finding in the lab.
Researchers at St. Jude and collaborating institutions introduced AdaptiveFlow, an AI-informed system that can search libraries containing tens of billions of potential drug molecules while cutting computational costs by roughly 1,000-fold compared with previous approaches.
And the next step is already being built. Roche says it has begun building autonomous AI laboratories where AI can help choose experiments, robots perform them, the results feed back into the system and the next experiment can be selected.
Think about what happens as the amount of compute available to these systems keeps increasing. Instead of one researcher exploring one hypothesis at a time, we can have thousands - eventually millions - of AI researchers exploring possibilities simultaneously, with human scientists deciding which discoveries are worth pursuing.
Cancer. Alzheimer's. Rare diseases. New antibiotics. New materials. Aging.
The same infrastructure we started this issue talking about - chips, data centers and massive amounts of energy - is ultimately infrastructure for discovery. And that may be the most exciting part of all.
Tusk Live Webinar
𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟲 𝗮𝘁 𝟴 𝗣𝗠 𝗘𝗧
Your exit doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
On 𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟲 𝗮𝘁 𝟴 𝗣𝗠 𝗘𝗧, Connor Jorgensen of TUSK Practice Sales joins Orthopreneurs live to discuss why you don’t have to sell it all—and a deal structure designed to protect the practice, the associate, and your legacy long after closing without giving up control.
The session will also cover what’s changing in doctor-to-doctor transactions and how macroeconomic trends are influencing valuations and OSO partnerships.
You don’t need to be ready to sell to benefit from the conversation.𝗧𝘂𝗲𝘀𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝗢𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟲 𝗮𝘁 𝟴 𝗣𝗠 𝗘𝗧
✨ Final Thoughts
The story isn't really about data centers. It's about what the data centers make possible.
More compute gives us more intelligence. More intelligence drives demand for more energy and infrastructure. That intelligence is moving into farms, construction equipment, vehicles, laboratories and eventually millions of robots throughout the physical world.
None of this means we should ignore the risks that come with AI. But caution and pessimism are not the same thing.
I don't want my kids growing up in a world that decided the safest option was to stop building because something might go wrong.
I want them growing up in a world of abundance - abundant energy, abundant intelligence, abundant food, better healthcare, cheaper goods and services, safer transportation and opportunities we haven't even imagined yet.
That's why I look at the AI buildout and feel optimistic. We are building the infrastructure to do things that simply weren't possible before.
And I think there is an incredible amount to be excited about.
I hope you agree.
– Mike Vidikan
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