Author: Zen, PANews
Less than a year after the last $4.6 billion growth fund closed, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has nearly completed a new fund, “Growth IV,” totaling about $6 billion. Reports indicate that approximately $1.5 billion of this comes from Founders Fund partners’ own investments, attracting significant institutional and investor interest, with external LP subscription demand exceeding the fund’s capacity.
Beyond the capital logic where top-tier funds hold strong bargaining power, as one of Silicon Valley’s most ideologically charged capital groups, Founders Fund’s fundraising again signals a declaration: AI, defense technology, aerospace, and “national capabilities” are once again central themes for capital.
What makes Founders Fund unique is its embedding of a very explicit vision that links technology directly to politics into its investment practice. From SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril to Stripe and OpenAI, it manages a portfolio that spans national foundational capabilities and platform technologies, capable of directly integrating into national power, becoming part of security, intelligence, aerospace, industry, and infrastructure.
“Returning to the Original Aspiration”: Recreating Cold War-style Tech Nation Model
In recent years, Silicon Valley tech elites leaning toward the right have become a new phenomenon. These tech-right groups are characterized by a belief that technological progress, capital, and high-capability elites should lead society, coupled with a disdain for progressive cultural politics, high regulation, and an increasing willingness to bind technology with national power.
Many describe this as Silicon Valley’s “invasion” of the Pentagon. But in reality, Silicon Valley has never truly separated from the U.S. national machinery; what is happening today is simply a reassertion of that relationship.
In the internet age, the public has imagined Silicon Valley as a mythic garage full of tech geniuses, anti-bureaucracy, anti-government, and entirely built on free markets. But historically, Silicon Valley’s origins are deeply rooted in military-industrial and national research systems.
In the 1960s, Fairchild Semiconductor helped the U.S. lead in space exploration and the computer revolution.
During the Cold War, top universities like Stanford undertook numerous defense-related research projects, with early electronic startups primarily serving military and government clients. Therefore, innovation and growth in early high-tech industries were closely tied to the U.S. national security system. For example, the roots of the modern internet trace back to projects from the U.S. Department of Defense’s DARPA in the 1960s.
Additionally, NASA’s Apollo program’s specifications and procurement needs significantly advanced semiconductor manufacturing innovation and technology maturity, helping to reduce costs after the processes matured. In other words, early chips did not first prove themselves in the civilian market and then naturally enter the national system; instead, national needs initially propelled their development, which was then gradually commercialized.
This is why Thiel and his allies’ current strategic layout can be seen as a revival of a “Cold War-style tech nation” model. The difference is that during the Cold War, the main actors were government labs, DARPA, NASA, and traditional contractors, whereas today’s new players are military-civilian dual-use tech platforms supported by venture capital. The Pentagon has not exited; instead, it is actively ceding the source of innovation to the commercial tech ecosystem.
Thiel was among the earliest and clearest to embrace this shift. Founders Fund has long been an investor in “AI arms dealer” Palantir (Thiel himself is a co-founder). It also has been a core supporter of “AI defense company” Anduril, leading a $1 billion investment last year to help Anduril raise $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation.
Meanwhile, SpaceX, which controls commercial space, military satellites, battlefield communications, and launch capabilities, exemplifies private capital penetrating critical national infrastructure. It secures massive contracts from NASA and the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, while also building a global commercial footprint through launch services, commercial satellites, and Starlink broadband. Notably, Starlink not only provides communication services to remote areas, maritime, and aviation sectors but has also effectively served as a basic communications infrastructure on the Ukrainian battlefield.
Internal Divisions within the Tech-Right
Similarly influential in the tech-right camp, a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) commands the capital markets with a $15 billion fund raised earlier this year, capturing nearly 18% of all U.S. venture capital funding.
In recent years, a16z has shifted noticeably to the right, no longer satisfied with just consumer internet investments, and has begun framing “national interests” as an investment theme. It has established a dedicated “U.S. Momentum” focus, investing in companies supporting national interests across defense, manufacturing, supply chains, education, housing, and public safety.
However, grouping Thiel and Marc Andreessen of a16z into the same camp masks internal differences; their strategic orientations are not identical.
a16z’s core remains more aligned with technological accelerationism rather than Thiel-style elite nationalism. Andreessen emphasizes concerns over excessive regulation, suppressed innovation, and the need to rebuild American strength. Consequently, a16z is heavily invested in AI, crypto, enterprise software, biotech, and defense tech, betting on “the wave of technology itself” rather than explicitly favoring security state, geopolitical competition, or high-threshold platforms like Thiel.
According to a Reuters report last year, a16z even plans to raise a $20 billion AI mega-fund aimed at capturing global capital flows into U.S. AI companies. Thiel’s Founders Fund, by contrast, tends to concentrate investments on a few “civilizational” companies, willing to pour enormous resources into a very select few winners.
This is the key difference between the two approaches. a16z believes in the free expansion of technology, while Thiel believes in creating a few dominant strategic tech companies—underpinned by a distinct political philosophy. “To create and capture lasting value, companies should pursue monopolies,” Thiel’s approach often carries a clear, even blunt, elitist tone. In investment terms, he prefers companies that structurally reduce competition, raise barriers, and control critical nodes.
Because of this, the tech-right alliance closely associated with Trump is inherently fragile. Their common ground is opposition to the establishment, disdain for recent Democratic regulation and cultural politics, and shared language around “great power competition,” “U.S. industrial resurgence,” and “rebuilding national capacity.”
But the divide between elites and populists is equally evident and irreconcilable. MAGA’s social base leans toward populist protectionism, anti-immigration, and anti-globalization. In contrast, Silicon Valley capital—representing the tech-right—relies heavily on high-skilled immigration, global talent networks, and cross-border capital flows. When Trump’s administration increased H-1B costs and tightened scrutiny, it directly impacted U.S. tech companies, which depend heavily on engineers from India, China, and around the world in the AI race.
The AI issue further magnifies this rift. Tech-right tends to see AI as the core engine of U.S. growth and national competition, opposing regulation and security constraints. Trump’s efforts to restrict state AI regulation with federal funding align with this tech-capital preference. Yet, grassroots MAGA supporters are far less unified on AI, worried about job displacement and instinctively distrustful of Silicon Valley giants’ culture and power expansion.
The Growing Distance of Tech Innovation Benefits from Ordinary People
Recently, besides the news that Founders Fund will close a $6 billion fund, venture capital firm General Catalyst is also raising about $10 billion. Top-tier funds are planning massive fundraising activities, reflecting a broader trend: capital and technology are increasingly flowing into a handful of dominant platforms. According to FT, over half of U.S. VC funding in 2024 is expected to go to just nine firms, with the number of active VCs dropping more than 25% from the 2021 peak.
This results in two consequences—the concentration of the entrepreneurial ecosystem itself and the retreat of high-potential tech companies from public markets.
On one hand, top funds are better able to hold onto their leading portfolio companies, and subsequent funding rounds require ever larger capital, reducing the number of players capable of participating in later-stage financing. On the other hand, giants like Databricks, Stripe, SpaceX, and OpenAI are seeking ways to stay long-term in the private market, with large private financings dubbed “private IPOs.” In other words, without the pressures of public disclosure and market scrutiny, these companies can expand through massive private funding rounds that would otherwise only be possible in the secondary market.
OpenAI is preparing for the largest IPO in history, with a valuation potentially approaching $1 trillion.
As a result, the most aggressive early-stage valuation expansions are increasingly absorbed by private markets, pushing the “public offering” point further into the future for ordinary investors. Many great tech companies historically achieved most of their market value growth after going public. Over the long term, U.S. venture capital as a whole has not consistently outperformed the Nasdaq.
This means that ordinary investors in the future may only participate in relatively later, more gradual growth phases; the explosive early-stage gains are increasingly confined within private markets.
The issue is even more serious when these companies shift from consumer-facing applications to national data platforms, government software, or satellite networks, gradually becoming part of institutional and infrastructural systems. The problem then is not just whether ordinary investors can share in growth but whether private capital is preemptively occupying key interfaces of future national and social operations with limited public accountability.
Palantir exemplifies this trend. Its business has accelerated significantly in recent years, largely based on a series of government contracts. While companies have the right to sell software to governments, when the same platform deeply integrates into military, intelligence, and immigration enforcement systems, it raises complex governance issues. The public’s concern is whether government procurement is merely acquiring tools or gradually binding governance capacity, data structures, and decision-making processes to private platforms.
Therefore, the real concern is not some mysterious “shadow controllers” narrative but the simultaneous occurrence of capital concentration, platformization of national capabilities, and lagging technological regulation. Thiel is not simply betting on the next unicorn; he is betting on the future structure of U.S. power itself, increasingly shaped by private-capital-driven technological platforms.
This process may not inevitably lead to a runaway “technological Leviathan,” but it will at least pose a more difficult question for democratic societies: when infrastructure, national capacity, and capital returns become more tightly intertwined, who has the institutional capacity to impose constraints before they overreach?
