People tell the AI boom as a story about chips and models. Underneath it is metal. Every data centre, chip, power line and robot starts with copper and a handful of other minerals. The United States has quietly lost control of where they come from. A two-year-old startup just raised $310m to change that.
Mariana Minerals is not selling software to miners. It owns and runs the mines itself, using its own AI stack, it announced. Khosla Ventures led the Series B, with a16z and Breakthrough Energy returning. It takes the company’s total capital to about $400m, at a $1.5bn valuation, Fortune first reported.
The founders are an unusual mix. Chief executive Turner Caldwell ran Tesla’s metals and minerals team. His co-founders came from machine learning at Affirm and from energy project finance. That blend is the whole pitch. Fuse mining execution, software and capital, they argue, and you can build a mine in half the usual time.
Copper, lithium and a China problem
The urgency is geopolitical. China dominates global mining. It processes as much as 90% of the world’s critical minerals. For the rare-earth magnets in phones and weapons, that rises to 92%. AI is driving metal demand to unprecedented levels. That dependence is now a national-security problem, not just an economic one.
