Mariana Minerals CEO and cofounder Turner Caldwell is betting that the next big use for AI won’t be another chatbot—it’ll be a copper mine.

His startup, Mariana Minerals, is launching the world’s first autonomous mining operation today at its Copper One mine in remote southeast Utah: automated drills do the digging, giant robotic haul trucks move ore for processing, and an AI-enabled platform called MarianaOS will track and direct the entire operation. The company is even using Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog, packed with sensors, to patrol the 10,000-acre site and inspect conditions.

If it works, Mariana could help boost both U.S. copper supply and U.S. copper refining as demand for the metal climbs and the politics around “critical minerals” grows louder. In a few years, the company could be generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from both the Utah copper mine and a separate lithium refining operation it’s setting up in Texas, recovering the mineral from wastewater from oil and gas fields.

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“This will be the first mine operating with end-to-end autonomy,” Caldwell told Forbes. “When we look at the opportunity of autonomous mining and autonomous refining, we see the potential for a 30% reduction in refining costs and a 40% to 50% reduction in mining costs.”

Mariana’s platform analyzes the ore it’s collecting in real time from sensor data, while also acting as a communication layer between the automated drill rigs and haul trucks, each of which operates with their own AI systems.

Copper is everywhere—electronics, electrical wiring, batteries, plumbing and industrial equipment. And it’s expensive, trading for about $13,000 a ton. The U.S. produces some copper, but imports roughly half of what it uses, mainly from Chile and Canada, with much of that ore being refined in China. San Francisco-based Mariana, backed by $100 million raised from powerhouse tech VCs including Andreessen Horowitz, Breakthrough Energy, Earthshot Ventures and Khosla Ventures, also intends to refine copper scrap at the Utah site, with a goal of producing 50,000 tons of refined copper a year, from new and recycled sources, by 2030.

The mine that Mariana bought late last year operated as the Lisbon Valley Mining Company until it shut down in 2024, due to rising operating costs and difficulties finding human workers.

“Workforce availability in these remote regions …can be challenging,” Caldwell said. “A lot of the reason they had to shut down was labor pool availability and not enough haul truck drivers.” It’s here that automation will have the biggest impact. “If the workforce doesn't exist or it’s very costly to mobilize in these remote regions, autonomy looks like a clear drop-in.”

Even so, he expects human headcount at the site to grow “pretty significantly” from its previous level, just with different jobs: more technical and maintenance staff rather than miners and drivers.

Andreessen Horowitz, Mariana’s main backer, got involved because “we see mining and critical minerals as a big and important space that has been broadly underinvested in from a tech perspective for the last several decades,” said Erin Price-Wright, a general partner with the Silicon Valley-based venture firm. “It's very much not like oil and gas, which has had a lot of tech adoption. It's pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum.”

Caldwell is not wandering into this cold. He previously managed Tesla’s battery minerals and metals team, helping build up its battery recycling operations and designing the company’s lithium refinery in Texas. “When we met Turner, we were like: this is the person that can do it; that can build out the team; that's built these kinds of complex, deeply operational projects. He understands the industry,” Price-Wright said.

Mariana’s autonomy stack is stitched together from the same types of AI tools, particularly reinforcement learning, that underpin self-driving vehicles and allow humanoid robots to navigate complex environments, Caldwell said. At CopperOne, it’s using autonomous drills supplied by Finland’s Sandvik and robotic haul trucks from Pronto, a self-driving tech company acquired by Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick’s Atoms earlier this year.

Pronto was created by Anthony Levandowski, part of Google’s original self-driving car team before its rebranding as Waymo, and who was recruited by Kalanick to lead Uber’s autonomous vehicle program in 2016. Not long after, he was accused of stealing intellectual property from Waymo. Ultimately, he pled guilty to one count of trade secret theft in federal court in 2020 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2021, his final day in office during his first term.

Extracting and refining copper at the Utah mine using AI-enabled software is critical to the company’s ability to supply the metal at a competitive market price, and the tech may also be a way to overcome a growing shortage of mining expertise in the U.S. to compete with China.

“That labor pool has basically been halved in the last 20 years. And in the next 10 years, it’s on pace to halve again,” Caldwell said. “We don't actually have the engineers who know how to design the infrastructure. We don't have the engineers who know how to develop the chemistry for refineries. We don't have the engineers who know how to optimize that chemistry and get it running at scale. And we don't have time to spend two generations waiting to retrain and rebuild that labor pool.”

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