All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Dan Dreyfus: America's Critical Minerals Crisis is Here
10 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the future of critical minerals in America?
We've got Dan Dreyfuss on the show. He's with Boronite Capital.
We're going to be measuring human progress by how much electricity we consume.
The semiconductor industry, I view that as an industrial or infrastructure company. I mean, it's effectively a factory.
Chapter 2: How has China's export policy affected the US critical minerals supply?
We try to figure out where the world is going, and then we try to figure out what we're going to need to get there.
In the next 10 minutes, I am going to try to teach you about critical minerals, commodities, our incredibly fragile infrastructure here in the US that is going to require trillions and trillions of dollars of investment if we want to achieve our technological objectives, our reshoring, reindustrialization objectives, and our national security and military objectives.
Chapter 3: Why is copper considered essential for future energy needs?
But first, a little bit of history. We are at a very significant inflection point right now in US economic growth and what it's going to look like. Really, from the early 2000s until just a few years ago, the US went through effectively what I think was an economic miracle, where we created so much growth, so much market cap, so much value, without really having to invest any capital at all.
Chapter 4: What is the impact of dollar debasement on hard assets?
I mean, think of all the companies that were created with no capital.
Chapter 5: How is the US grid facing challenges and what are the consequences?
You had Google with the search engine. You had Meta with social media. They bought WhatsApp for $30 billion with 12 employees. You know, no capital whatsoever. You had the streaming platforms. You had the food delivery platforms.
Chapter 6: What investment strategies should be considered during the commodity supercycle?
You had Apple Computer, which was capital light, created trillions of market cap. You had software as a service. Absolutely no capital required to create all that value. And at the same time we were creating these companies, at the same time we were doing that, we were literally tearing down all of our critical infrastructure and moving it overseas to China.
So we were really doubling down on that capital-light mentality. But then it started to come back to bite us, right? We had COVID, we had the Russia-Ukraine conflict, we had the tariffs, now we have the Iranian conflict. And every time we had one of these geopolitical flare-ups, inflation spiked like a rocket. You need a telescope to see how high inflation went, and it never came down.
And the reason for that is we let our supply chains get way too fragile and way too weak, and there's no resiliency in the supply chains. And now we're at this inflection point where we want to reshore everything that we tore down and moved to China. We want to reindustrialize.
We have this technological compute revolution that is infinitely more infrastructure-intensive than compute was in the last generations. And this is creating this really wild demand shock for infrastructural, critical minerals, commodities at the same time where there's a supply shock because we just haven't invested in this stuff for so long. Now,
There are so many capital cycles going on at the same time. I've never seen this many going on at the same time in my career. We have the aerospace cycle. Boeing and Airbus have a trillion dollars of backlog over the next 10 years. Now throw in the space economy, which is going to compete for the exact same materials and backlog that Boeing and Airbus are trying to source. We have the grid.
Right? Anytime it gets a little bit cold in Texas, the ERCOT, the Texas grid's not connected to the rest of the U.S.
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Chapter 7: How can the US secure its critical mineral supply chain?
grid. Every time it gets a little bit cold, that grid shuts down and they're freezing in the dark. Then we've got, you know, here in California, Paradise, California, that power line that caught on fire and killed 300 people. Did you know that that power line was over 106 years old? There's parts of the grid in this country that are over 106 years old.
And here in California, if half the people buy electric cars or there's robo-taxis and we all go and plug them in at 6 p.m. after work and turn up the air conditioning, We're just going to kill the grid. Boom. We're going to kill it. We're all going to be sitting in the dark. So the grid barely works for what we need it for right now.
And we haven't even started talking about the tsunami of demand, electricity demand that AI is going to bring. And there's power generation. You know, we've let China go and build multiples more power generation than what we have here. And this is a trillion dollar playoff. plus capital cycle that's probably gonna be a trillion dollars every 10 years for the next 30 years.
Data centers, this is now a trillion dollars per year. per year, all infrastructure, all commodities. Then there's semi-fabs. The CPU is making a huge resurgence. CPU intensity is going up like a rocket. And I bet you this number is way too low, $750 billion. I bet you that's gonna be measured into trillions. And then there's defense, right? Everybody, Taiwan's turned into a porcupine.
Japan's raising their defense budgets. Europe's raising their defense budgets. The US raising their defense budgets. What the similarity is amongst all of these end markets is none of them will work without critical minerals. None of it. None of this can happen. And so here's the problem. Last April, China announced that they were going to cut off exports of some critical materials to the US.
Samarium, gandalinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, yttrium, erbium, silver. Just cut it off. And we're close to a lot of big industrial supply chains.
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Chapter 8: What innovations could reshape the mining industry and critical minerals access?
And the cutoff of samarium-cobalt magnets, we learned that the Ford Motor Company was within days literally days of their entire production line shutting down, the whole Ford Motor Company. And same with McDonnell Douglas, too, by the way. And this put people in the Department of War, Department of Energy into a panic.
And to their credit, they're doing something really aggressive and really important. They are now going around to small resource owners across the US and into Canada And they're knocking on the doors of these companies that were left for dead in the last 20 years. And they're saying, here is three pieces of paper.
The first piece of paper is an equity check that we're investing into your company so that you can go and start converting your resource into a mine. And then the company says, oh, that's great. Wow, that's a shock. But the problem is I've been waiting on my permit for the last 20 years. Nobody wants to give me a permit. They say, oh, look at the second piece of paper. There's your permit.
Go and start building right now. And then they show them a third piece of paper. And then the company says, what's this? And they say, this is an offtake agreement. Take or pay with the minimum floor price. It's going to guarantee you a very high internal rate of return on your project where you can keep all the upside above the minimum price.
But here's a minimum price that you can go out and raise a bunch of capital to get this thing fast-tracked and up and running. Now, China has an absolute grip. It's absolute on all of these critical minerals.
And it's gonna take at least 10 years, probably 20 to catch up, but we gotta start somewhere because we just can't have China leading over us and squeezing our testicles every time that we don't do something that they don't like and say, we're gonna cut off your exports, we're gonna cut off our exports of critical minerals and you guys are gonna freeze in the dark. So I give a lot of credit
to the administration for doing this. And really, I've done commodities now for 25 years, and I've never seen something like this happen before. It's truly what I call a vuja de moment, which is the overwhelming feeling that none of this has ever happened before. So here's copper. This is the king of metals. This is just one example. We need copper for everything.
If we want clean energy, solar power per megawatt takes five times the amount of copper than a typical baseload CCGT gas-fired turbine. Same with wind, seven times the copper. Data centers for a one-gigawatt AI factory now, you need 50,000 tons of copper per gigawatt. And we're going to start building 15 gigawatts of these things per year. per year.
So 50,000 tons per gigawatt at 15 gigawatts is 750,000 tons of copper that we're going to need for these things. Do you know what the copper supply was last year? It grew only 500,000 tons. And this is just the data centers.
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