For the tech moguls who have invested fortunes in frontier AI labs, the lifestyle is romantic, but the work is practical. “Silicon Valley cares about this because data centers are made of metal. That’s it,” one executive at a mining start-up tells me. “They’re levered to the tits on a big bet that depends on the build-out of AI infrastructure.”
Demand for copper, which is for wiring in data centers, will increase by 50% by 2040, according to the data company S&P Global. At the same time, America’s energy consumption is expected to skyrocket, prompting a scramble to build nuclear reactors, solar farms, and natural gas power plants, which will require even more critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. Today, China has a “near-total dominance” over the critical-minerals market, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
There’s now a critical-mineral start-up for every preferred brand of cowboy. Want to explore the open ocean? Try Wetstone, which is pursuing deep-sea mining rights. More of a space cowboy? AstroForge has raised $55 million to mine metals on asteroids. Prefer trekking through foreign forests? KoBold Metals, which has raised $1 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Jeff Bezos, is using AI to discover untapped minerals in places like Zambia. And Uber founder Travis Kalanick just announced a $1.7 billion equity investment to build “physical AI,” including autonomous mining machines at the Iraq–Saudi Arabia border.
All these companies offer some version of the same promise: In order to keep up with the demands of AI, we must use AI to usher in a new era of ore discovery, mining, and refining—one that is safer and more efficient. But there’s a reason mining is not typically a venture-backed industry: It’s massively expensive. “A hundred million dollars is literally nothing in the mining industry,” says Robert Friedland, the billionaire founder of Ivanhoe Mines. “I mean, just on one project in Mongolia, just to see whether the metal was there, we’d spend a couple billion dollars drilling.”
Morgan Bazilian, a professor of public policy at the Colorado School of Mines, says that Silicon Valley can pour all the capital it wants into new-age mining: It won’t change the fact that it’s a brutal industry plagued by a shrinking labor pool and stunted by permits that can take a decade to get. “Digging up ore is a totally different thing than whether you can raise money in Silicon Valley,” Bazilian says. “A lot of those companies will go bankrupt.”
So why, then, are young men, armed with hundreds of millions of dollars, heading back into the mines?
Historically, one of the biggest challenges in mining has been finding people who actually want to mine. While the gold rush may have kick-started an era of large-scale American mining, public sentiment curdled over the next century: Between the environmental impact and backbreaking labor, people wondered if it was too high a cost.