Now, another startup, Earth AI, exclusively told TechCrunch about its own discovery: promising deposits of critical minerals in parts of Australia that other mining outfits had ignored for decades. While it's still not known whether they are as large as KoBold's, the news suggests that future supplies of critical minerals are likely to emerge from a combination of field data parsed by artificial intelligence. Earth AI has identified deposits of copper, cobalt, and gold in the Northern Territory and silver, molybdenum, and tin at another site in New South Wales, 310 miles (500 kilometers) northwest of Sydney. Earth AI emerged from Teslyuk's graduate studies. Teslyuk, a native of Ukraine, was working toward a doctorate at the University of Sydney, where he became familiar with the mining industry in Australia. There, the government owns the rights to mineral deposits, and it leases them in six-year terms. Since the 1970s, he said, exploration companies are required to submit their...
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