Interview, Fireside Chat
The U.S. Can’t Build AI Without These Materials
- Mariana aims to raise $85 million upon emerging from stealth to establish a technology-enabled, diversified metal and minerals company focused on the back end of the value chain, including engineering, permitting, construction, commissioning, and operation.
- The company plans to execute a 10-year mission to build 10 projects with increasing scale, leveraging PlantOS and reinforcement learning to automate chemical processing and refining, targeting a 30-40% reduction in reagent and energy consumption.
- By utilizing large language models, Mariana intends to accelerate construction, engineering, and procurement workflows, aiming to allow 200 employees to perform tasks currently requiring 10,000 people while enabling hyper-dynamic, flexible processing circuits that adapt to ore variability.
- Forecasts indicate that lithium production capacity must quadruple over the next 10 years to support battery demand, while global copper grades are expected to decline, necessitating optimized refining circuits to extract value from lower-grade ores without significant cost increases.
- Strategic plans include integrating commercially demonstrated unit operations, supporting novel process technologies, and expanding globally beyond the U.S., potentially into underwater environments, as the company seeks to discover more resources and build projects domestically and internationally.
- The outlook anticipates that AI and machine learning will achieve global optimal operating conditions on an order of magnitude faster timescale than historical trends and will enable pace adjustments in new process chemistries without manual fine-tuning.
- Market expectations suggest that U.S. domestic onshore mining will become politically necessary due to supply chain reliance on China, with demand for metals contingent on supply availability and commercial deployment dependent on government support.
- Regulatory and structural plans involve advocating for reduced permitting thresholds and streamlined environmental reviews to address rare earth exploration gaps and talent shortages, while exploring capital stack participation that may include government equity positions.
- It is predicted that government demand-side support, such as oftake agreements with floor pricing, could mobilize trillions in private capital, though the sector faces risks including the loss of U.S. capability to operate complex minerals plants if large-scale infrastructure is not built.
- The company expects to resolve its fundamental capability to build complex infrastructure by the end of the 10-year mission, positioning itself to no longer worry about basic execution constraints while addressing global supply constraints through efficiency and automation.