Energy, Minerals, and the Physical Stack Behind AI
5/13/202625 min
Erin Price-Wright speaks with Turner Caldwell and Drew Baglino about what it will take to close America's critical minerals gap and modernize the power infrastructure that underpins the AI economy. With the US more than 50 years behind China in critical mineral supply and grid infrastructure built on systems designed a century ago, they examine where the real bottlenecks are and how to move faster.
The conversation covers how automation, reinforcement learning, and vertically integrated operations can compress the timelines for mining and refining, and why co-locating supply chains matters more than labor costs in the race to reshore manufacturing. Baglino explains how solid state transformers can replace aging mechanical grid equipment with silicon and software, while Caldwell outlines how Mariana Minerals is applying autonomous systems to remove the know-how bottleneck from critical mineral processing.
They also discuss the lessons both founders carried from Tesla — techno-optimism, appetite for risk, and mission-driven talent — and what durable industrial policy, smarter permitting, and a federal grid investment framework would unlock for American competitiveness.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsTurner Caldwell· Guest0:00
The US is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply. We are too slow at designing, building, and ramping up new minerals capacity even after we have license to operate.
Drew Baglino· Guest0:09
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.
Erin Price-Wright· Host0:14
You both came out of Tesla. What does the Tesla model give you that a traditional industrial company doesn't have?
Turner Caldwell· Guest0:20
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.
Drew Baglino· Guest0:37
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 II.
Speaker 30:53
American critical mineral supply sits 50 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