Boston lab space is 28.9% empty. The Bay Area is at 30.7%. Houston is at 26.3%. The XBI is up more than 20% this year. So why is no one moving back into these labs? Honestly, it shouldn't surprise anyone. Back in 2021 and 2022, the whole game was cramming as many researchers and benches into a building as you could. A few things changed that pretty fast. - AI-native biotechs lease about a third less space per person. - Pharma is licensing molecules and sending manufacturing overseas. When we ran a talk at MBC Biolabs, we heard that close to 80% of the companies there outsource some or all of their manufacturing to Chinese firms. - Later-stage companies want office, not lab. They're managing assets already in trials. The lab of 2026 just looks different. Teams are smaller. The science is AI-native. And a lot of the actual work isn't happening in Boston or SF anymore. It's happening in Shanghai and Suzhou. The R&D that does happen here is smaller, leaner, and set up to scale out somewhere else. Those teams don't need rows of benches. They need machines. If your building has 500 benches but not a single mass spec, liquid handler, or flow cytometer, nobody's going to want it. The equipment is the real bottleneck for early-stage work. The few groups that still want big footprints are building them around robots and power. @LilaSciences grabbed about 244,000 sq ft at Alewife Park in Cambridge for autonomous labs. @medra_ai put hundreds of robots into a concrete industrial building in SF. So here's the uncomfortable part. These buildings were built for a tenant that doesn't exist anymore. That tenant isn't coming back. Leaving the space empty and hoping 2021 returns isn't a plan. You have to rebuild it for who actually needs space now. - Deep tech and hard tech. I've been talking with groups here in SF, and a lot of robotics and hardware teams are looking for exactly this kind of space. Strong floors, real power, good ventilation. Retrofitting a lab is way faster than building new. - Incubators built around machines, not benches. Rip out the bench rows and put in the instruments early-stage companies can't afford on their own. MBC Biolabs is already doing this. Shared instruments, shared equipment, small teams that don't need 50,000 sq ft. Landlords who follow that blueprint will fill their buildings. The ones waiting on 2021 are going to keep sitting empty.

The Tesla Model 3 with FSD is mind-blowing. Jessica and I drove to the gym without touching the controls once. It backed out of our driveway, drove there, and backed into a parking space. It's amazing that you can buy so much future for $40k.