Turner Caldwell

The U.S.

is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply.

We are too slow at designing, building, and ramping up new minerals capacity, even after we have licensed to operate.

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.

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 lifecycle management tool, is the way to think about it, but that goes from process development and mine development all the way through engineering, construction, and procurement operations.

and doing agentic workflow automation kind of through that stack.

PlantOS is how we use reinforcement learning to control refineries.

And MineOS is, again, how we use reinforcement learning to control, do short-interval autonomous control of mining operations.

But we do not sell software.

We are not a SaaS company.

We develop, we engineer, build, and operate minerals projects.

And so we have a copper mine that's operating in southeast Utah that's producing high-grade copper refineries.

materials today, high purity copper materials today.

And we're building a lithium refinery in Texas with the goal of building 10 projects in the next 10 years.

Yeah, I think put plainly, the U.S.

is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply.