The Future is Metal - Mariana Minerals | a16z American Dynamism
Over 90% of US critical minerals are refined in China, threatening AI hardware supply chains.
“Over 90% of the critical minerals we use are refined in China today, which is kind of wild to imagine given that that was a very fast transition just over the last several decades.”
Mariana Minerals CEO Turner Caldwell (ex-Tesla) argues that critical minerals — required for AI data centers, robots, and batteries — are a severe supply chain vulnerability given China's dominance in refining. The company aims to apply modern technology to US domestic mining the way Tesla and SpaceX transformed their respective industries. While the AI angle is secondary to a broader industrial/national security narrative, the minerals bottleneck has real implications for AI hardware scaling.