Energy, Minerals, and the Physical Stack Behind AI

The US is fifty years behind on critical minerals supply. We are too slow at designing, building, and ramping up new minerals capacity even after we have licensed operate. Even though there's so much innovation happening at the edge of the grid, on the other side of the wire, there's really been no change. You both came out of Tesla. What does the Tesla model give you that a traditional industrial company doesn't have? 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 and refineries where we use reinforcement learning to actually remove humans from the loop in determining how refineries operate. The world's leading producer of silicon carbide, which is a key power semiconductor, is based here in The US. And so we should be leveraging the applications of that technology here first, manufacturing here at home, and if we don't The US power grid runs on mechanical systems designed before World War two. American critical mineral supply sits fifty years behind China, and demand for both is accelerating faster than at any point in history. For decades, the bet was that innovation at the edge, better batteries, smarter software, faster chips, would be enough. It wasn't. The infrastructure underneath never kept up. Grid transformers are still steel, oil, and copper. Critical minerals still flow through refineries The US doesn't own or control. Two founders who built the MegaPack, the forty six eighty battery cell, and Tesla's global mineral supply chain think the same playbook that rewired the auto industry can rewire the grid and the mine. The constraint isn't ambition. It's whether American industry can move fast enough to matter. Turner Caldwell and Drew Baglino speak with Aaron Price Wright about megawatts, minerals, and the new strategic high ground. Now it's tempting to talk about the AI race as a competition of models and chips, but the truth is that AI dominance and reindustrialization more broadly are physical projects. They are energy projects. They are mining and refining projects. They are manufacturing projects. They are grid scale projects. Every breakthrough model, new factory, and autonomous system that we'll talk about here today has a real world requirement underneath it. Materials, energy, and the ability to move electricity where it's needed, when it's needed. We increasingly hear concerns that AI will put an undue strain on an already faltering grid. We'll demand more energy than we can give, more build out than we can keep up with. And in many ways, these are fair concerns. But rather than taking this at face value and putting our pencils down on progress, we see this as a call to action, an opportunity. We can do great things in this country. We have rallied around national projects before, accomplished things few dream possible, and we can do so again. This is the next chapter …