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........

© Forbes