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Price-Wright: Building a mining tech company requires end-to-end vertical integration

Erin Price-Wright · The U.S. Can’t Build AI Without These Materials · Jul 23, 2025 · at 41:23

Erin Price-Wright, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), outlines a16z's thesis on investing in hard tech and critical mineral mining.

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“We actually do believe you have to control every single piece of the entire journey, the entire life cycle of, you know, an atom of metal end to end to actually be able to build a tech company here. This is not about, you know, a point solution for one particular part of the process in order to actually capture the gains and efficiency and build a feasible business. You really have to own the entire process end to end.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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Opinion
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Prediction Not checkable as stated
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Assertion Contradicted
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Assertion Partly supported
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“Getting a new project onto the grid today, you know, you sign up for interconnection, it could take a decade. There's a backlog of twenty-plus years to get a new transformer.”
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Assertion Partly supported
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Prediction Not checkable as stated
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“I do think though, okay, pushing back on that, like, I think that the, American consumer will fully organ reject that level of that dictation over how they use that.”
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