Descriptions:
Hosted at an a16z event, this panel conversation features Turner Caldwell (co-founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals) and Drew Begalino (founder and CEO of Heron Power) — both veterans of Tesla — making the case that America’s AI future is constrained not by model capability but by physical infrastructure: critical minerals, power electronics, and grid-scale energy delivery.
Mariana Minerals is described as a software-first mining and refining company with roughly 25% of staff in software and ML engineering roles. The company operates a high-purity copper mine in southeast Utah and is building a lithium refinery in Texas, with a target of 10 projects over the next 10 years. Caldwell explains how the company uses reinforcement learning across three operating systems — Capital Project OS, Plant OS, and Mine OS — to autonomously control refinery and mining operations, explicitly removing humans from certain operational loops. Heron Power focuses on silicon carbide-based power electronics to modernize electricity infrastructure, arguing that four decades of transistor improvements in power semiconductors have yet to be fully applied to grid modernization.
The conversation covers US vulnerabilities in critical mineral supply chains relative to China, the surprising finding that labor cost differentials account for less than 10% of manufacturing competitiveness, permitting and regulatory alignment challenges, and the vision of co-locating US supply chains to reduce logistics costs — analogous to how Chinese industrial zones cluster all inputs within a three-hour radius.
📺 Source: a16z · Published May 13, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
