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igh-tech companies that are building the technological infrastructure to power the New Economy are finding themselves paying more attention to their own infrastructures lately. Nowhere is this new reality more pronounced than in their new plant and expansion strategies, which suddenly are being re-evaluated in light of evaporating venture capital for start-ups, energy-supply problems, gathering economic storm clouds and a still-tight labor supply.
     It's not that the venture capitalists have fled the scene altogether. But pools of seed capital in most high-tech quarters are either drying up or requiring a lot more work to access. According to Venture Economics, 5,380 companies were financed by VC firms in 2000, but those taken public lost almost a quarter of their offering price by the end of the year. Venture capital raised in the U.S. was down to US$19.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2000. And according to Thomson Financial Securities Data, cited in BusinessWeek, the money raised by tech-sector IPOs went from $8.7 billion in March 2000 to zero in January 2001. VC firms are reengineering their portfolios to more stalwart companies -- separating the ad-venture from the capital, in a manner of speaking.