And up the supply chain.*
From The Deep View, August 3:
AI investing might not be all about powerful models and chips anymore.
....MUCH MOREThe blast radius of rapid AI innovation is starting to extend throughout industries, digging further and further into markets like energy and materials as the industry's so-called "five-layer cake" continues to bake. Now, investors are starting to put their money where their mouth is.
On Monday, two early-growth stage startups announced massive funding rounds from some of AI's most prominent investment firms, including Sequoia, a16z and Khosla Ventures. The catch: neither of these startups work directly on AI models or chips.
- Valar Atomics, a company that is building small-modular nuclear reactors, announced a $1 billion Series B funding round, with Bloomberg reporting the valuation to be $6 billion. The company has had previous partnerships with Nvidia, in which it's developing a waterless 30 megawatt AI factory.
- Mariana Minerals, a company that mines critical minerals for "modern energy, AI, and defense," raised a $310 million Series B funding round, though the valuation wasn't disclosed. In addition to supporting AI, the company's software, MarianaOS, uses AI and machine learning to cut mining execution timelines in half.
"Critical minerals are the materials that decide whether America builds its own future or keeps depending on China to build it instead," Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said in Mariana Minerals' announcement.
These investments are the latest sign that the market is shifting their dollars deeper into the AI stack. Nuclear companies have seen significant traction in recent months, including Antares, which raised $470 million, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which raised $1 billion, both to support the buildout of small nuclear reactors. And on the minerals side, companies like Terra AI and EnergyX are also attracting investor attention.
It comes as no surprise that investors are pointing their funds towards these endeavors. AI has created a compute crisis that drills all the way down the stack, and existing infrastructure is not ready to meet the demand. Along with data centers creating a stark demand for energy, the crunch for compute has led to a hastened buildout of AI data centers, which require critical minerals for chips and other parts of the infrastructure....
*July 20 -The Action In Silicon Is Moving Upstream From Chips To The Wafers The Chips Are Made From
