The Rare Earth Bottleneck

There’s a fascinating tension at the heart of AI infrastructure that most technical discussions completely miss: the more we digitize, the more we depend on what’s underground. Every optimization algorithm, every autonomous system, every data center promising to replace human labor rests on a foundation of physical extraction that looks nothing like the sleek interfaces we interact with.

The conversation with Ernest Scheyder, author of The War Below, reveals a structural reality that sits uncomfortably with our narratives about technological progress. While AI companies compete on model performance and infrastructure scale, they’re all drawing from the same constrained pool of critical minerals—copper, lithium, rare earth elements—that require digging giant holes in the ground.

This isn’t just a supply chain problem. It’s a fundamental constraint on the speed of transformation.