Energy, Minerals, and the Physical Stack Behind AI
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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The US is fifty years behind on critical minerals supply. We are too slow at designing, building, and ramping up new minerals capacity even after we have licensed operate.
Even though there's so much innovation happening at the edge of the grid, on the other side of the wire, there's really been no change.
We both came out of Tesla. What does the Tesla model give you that a traditional industrial company doesn't have?
The belief that you can innovate on systems that are old and archaic. If the outcome is worth it, Tesla will fight through the challenges of getting to that outcome. We're making a big bet on autonomy in refineries, where we use reinforcement learning to actually remove humans from the loop in determining how refineries operate.
The world's leading producer of silicon carbide, which is a key power semiconductor, is based here in The US. And so we should be leveraging the applications of that technology here first, manufacturing here at home. And if we don't
The US power grid runs on mechanical systems designed before World War II. American critical mineral supply sits fifty years behind China, and demand for both is accelerating faster than at any point in history. For decades, the bet was that innovation at the edge better batteries, smarter software, faster chips would be enough. It wasn't. The infrastructure underneath never kept up. Grid transformers are still steel, oil, and copper. Critical minerals still flow through refineries The US doesn't own or control. Two founders who built the Megapack, the 4,680 battery cell, and Tesla's global mi
Now it's tempting to talk about the AI race as a competition of models and chips, but the truth is that AI dominance and reindustrialization more broadly are physical projects. They are energy projects. They are mining and refining projects. They are manufacturing projects. They are grid scale projects. Every breakthrough model, new factory, and autonomous system that we'll talk about here today has a real world requirement underneath it. Materials, energy, and the ability to move electricity where it's needed, when it's needed. We increasingly hear concerns that AI will put an undue strain on
Yeah. So Mariana Minerals is a software first minerals mining and refining company. When I say software first, what that means is that about a quarter of the company is software engineers, machine learning engineers that are developing three core operating systems to accelerate project delivery and increase the amount of autonomy that we see in minerals operations and in refining operations. Capital Project OS is basically a product life cycle management tool. It's the way to think about it, but that goes from process development, mine development, all the way through engineering, construction
How about you, Drew?
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