Mariana Minerals raises $310m to run AI mines in the US

This article was published on August 3, 2026 Mariana Minerals has raised $310m at a $1.5bn valuation to build and run US copper and lithium mines with its own AI software. The pitch: the AI century needs metal, and America is losing the supply of it to China. People tell the AI boom as a story about chips and models. Underneath it is metal. Every data centre, chip, power line and robot starts with copper and a handful of other minerals. The United States has quietly lost control of where they come from. A two-year-old startup just raised $310m to change that. Mariana Minerals is not selling software to miners. It owns and runs the mines itself, using its own AI stack, it announced. Khosla Ventures led the Series B, with a16z and Breakthrough Energy returning. It takes the company’s total capital to about $400m, at a $1.5bn valuation, Fortune first reported. The founders are an unusual mix. Chief executive Turner Caldwell ran Tesla’s metals and minerals team. His co-founders came from machine learning at Affirm and from energy project finance. That blend is the whole pitch. Fuse mining execution, software and capital, they argue, and you can build a mine in half the usual time. The