Industrials and Manufacturing Sector
Major defense, logistics, and manufacturing investments boosted the industrials sector, led by Raytheon securing a $22.9 billion Navy contract for Tomahawk missiles. Domestic supply chains saw further momentum as Niron Magnetics obtained $150 million for a Minnesota magnet plant and Hertha Metals produced high-purity iron in Texas. Freight volume also remained strong, with the Port of Los Angeles handling over 960,000 TEUs in July and BNSF Railway expanding its intermodal service.
Google won a bankruptcy auction to acquire internal operational data and software code from defunct carrier Spirit Airlines for $10 million. The winning bid secures roughly 100 million employee emails across 80,000 accounts, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, 17 million OneDrive files, 20 million SharePoint files, and 516 source code repositories. Google plans to feed this digital back-office archive into its artificial intelligence models and product development pipelines. A third party will strip personally identifiable information from the files before delivery, with Google covering the anonymization costs and bearing the contractual obligation to keep the dataset isolated from specific households. The asset sale bested a $7.5 million competing bid from AI data specialist Mercor. Spirit, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in August 2025 and ceased operations in May 2026, excluded passenger profiles and credit card records from the transaction.
BNSF Railway expanded its intermodal service connecting Phoenix and North Texas to run six days a week, offering shippers a transit time of just over three days. The enhanced route targets over-the-road truck freight as shippers seek capacity ahead of the domestic peak shipping season. The corridor operates through the Alliance Intermodal Facility in North Texas and precedes the scheduled early 2027 opening of the first phase of Logistics Park Phoenix, BNSF's second intermodal facility in the area. The rail carrier is concurrently advancing its Barstow International Gateway project, a 4,500-acre California facility budgeted at $4 billion.
The U.S. Navy awarded RTX subsidiary Raytheon a $22.9 billion seven-year contract to ramp up production of Tomahawk cruise missiles. The multi-year deal aims to stabilize supply chains, expand the company's workforce, and sustain an annual output of more than 1,000 missiles. RTX also partnered with Boeing under separate agreements to accelerate component manufacturing for SM-3 Block IIA and SM-3 Block IB munitions. The contract builds on prior investments that already tripled Tomahawk deliveries in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period a year earlier. Smaller suppliers across the United States will share in the expanded manufacturing push.