Turner Caldwell
Turner Caldwell is the co-founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals, a software-first critical minerals company he founded in 2024. He spent nearly a decade at Tesla, where he served as Senior Manager of Battery Minerals and Metals and built the company's global mineral supply chain, including playing a key role in Tesla's lithium refinery project in Corpus Christi, Texas. At Mariana Minerals, which raised a $120 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, he leads efforts to automate mining and refining operations using autonomous systems and AI, with active projects including a copper mine in southeastern Utah and a lithium extraction facility in East Texas. Caldwell holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.
“The U.S. is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply. We are too slow at designing, building, and ramping up new mineral capacity, even after we have license to operate.”
Source→“We develop, we engineer, build, and operate minerals projects. We have a copper mine that's operating in southeast Utah producing high-purity copper materials today. And we're building a lithium refinery in Texas with the goal of building 10 projects in the next 10 years.”
Source→“We're making a big bet on the fact that we can build systems that enable us to engineer things faster using large language models, accelerate the procurement lifecycle, and do autonomous, short-interval control of construction operations.”
Source→“Co-founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals. Former Tesla minerals and metals team lead who built Tesla's global mineral supply chain.”
Source→“Participants: Drew Baglino, Erin Price-Wright, Turner Caldwell”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.