Powering the AI Supply Chain: Etched and Mariana Minerals Raise Follow-On Rounds

When most people think of AI, they think of chatbots, but Earthshot believes AI can create much more profound innovations in the real world. In fact, the IEA estimates AI could avoid 3x more emissions by 2035 than data centers produce. But this will only happen if it is applied to the hardest challenges in the physical economy.

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Earthshot invests heavily in the physical layer underneath AI that lies at the heart of this opportunity: the minerals, clean energy, and efficient computing that make intelligence possible. It's one interconnected supply chain, and it runs in a loop. Critical minerals enable data centers; data centers power intelligence; and that intelligence is applied back in the physical world to find and more efficiently mine and recover the metals needed to build more infrastructure.

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In the last two weeks, two of our portfolio companies announced new funding rounds, one at each end of this cycle.

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Etched: Purpose-Built Compute for AI Inference

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Etched announced its $300M Series C at a $10.3B valuation, led by Sequoia with participation from a16z, Jane Street, and SK Hynix. The company also opened an 80,000 square foot, 10 MW facility near its San Jose office to accelerate production.

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We wrote our first check in Etched’s April 2024 Series A, before the company had shipped a product. Our belief was simple and, at the time, somewhat lonely: inference would become the largest workload in computing, general purpose GPUs were the wrong tool for it, and purpose-built hardware would win. Crucially for us, Etched is built to be dramatically more energy efficient than the status quo. We also believed co-founders Robert Wachen and Gavin Uberti were two of the highest-potential, most rapidly inflecting founders we have ever encountered, and they’re proving us right.

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Two years later, Etched came out of stealth with working silicon and more than $1B in signed customer contracts. It now sells complete computing systems built for inference from the ground up. We have invested in the company three times, demonstrating our conviction in its ability to capture market share in what we believe will be one of the biggest markets in the world.

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Mariana Minerals: Software-First Mining

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Yesterday, Mariana Minerals announced a $310M Series B led by Khosla Ventures, with continued support from a16z and Breakthrough Energy Ventures and new investments from Greenoaks, Pax Ventures, StepStone, BHP Ventures, and Washington Harbour. The round values Mariana at $1.5B, and brings total capital raised across the company and its projects to approximately $400M.

We invested in late 2025 because we saw an opportunity to build a fundamentally cost-advantaged mining company by rethinking mine planning and operations from the ground up with a software and autonomy first mindset. Turner Caldwell saw this opportunity firsthand while running metals and minerals at Tesla. He went on to build a company that treats the mine itself as the product, with a single software platform managing everything from construction through refining.

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The proof is arriving fast. Copper One, outside Moab, restarted mining with operations autonomously orchestrated just four months after Mariana acquired it. The project is now ramping toward 50,000 metric tons of refined copper annually, roughly $650M worth at current prices. Mariana also integrated scrap recycling at Copper One, helping build a more circular supply chain for critical minerals while increasing the utilization of their refining infrastructure. Recycling is crucial to Earthshot’s vision for critical minerals. In order for the energy transition and AI revolution to happen at full speed, we need to fill a multi-trillion dollar supply gap with new minerals, and keep metals that have already been mined in circulation through profitable recycling.

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Additionally, Lithium One in East Texas broke ground last fall and will be the first GWh-scale plant to produce lithium from oil and gas produced water. Commercial output is targeted for the first half of 2027, part of Mariana’s roadmap to develop 10 projects in 10 years.

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Minerals → Compute → Intelligence → Climate Impact. Repeat.

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Congratulations to the teams at Etched and Mariana. We can’t wait to see how far you run.

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