You think the future is AI ? Data centers ? Chips and synthetic biology ? A world of intelligence, abstraction and infinite scalability.
Look at how the market is actually priced: in the S&P 500, close to half of the total market value sits in companies built on technology: Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Amazon.
None of them produce minerals, yet ALL of them depend on them, structurally. Copper. Lithium. Rare earths. Silicon.
According to the International Energy Agency, the technologies driving this future require multiple times more mineral inputs and energy than the systems they replace.
For instance:
- an electric vehicle uses up to 6x more mineral inputs than a combustion engine.
- a single offshore wind turbine uses 20-30 tonnes of copper in its electrical system, and in the cables that connect it to the shore.
- a "conventional" hyperscale data centre can contain 5,000-15,000 tonnes of copper, while an AI‑optimised hyperscale facility can use up to ~50,000 tonnes
At the same time, the average copper ore grade today is around 0.5%. Which means: to get 1 ton of copper, you move roughly 200 tons of rock!
Now remove that one thing: the minerals.
The entire system collapses.
This is the great paradox we are going to explore today: how an under-valued industry is supporting some of the most valued industries in the world. And therefore, why this is a danger.
To talk about the mining sector is difficult, without breaking the narratives. Because the system that underpins modern technology isn't a clean supply chain.
It is highly fragmented across: geographies, actors and incentives. No single entity owns it, no single framework explains it. And yet... it works.
The mining industry is one of the clearest expressions of the Grey Zone. A space where legality, power, economics and survival overlap.
To explore this topic, I had a conversation with Amanda Van Dyke. Amanda is the founder of the Critical Minerals Hub. She has recently written "the Mineral Imperative", and she is the Senior Strategy Advisor to the Primary Commodity Fund, a physical critical minerals trading fund.
In this conversation, we will look at what the global mining system actually looks like. Not from the sanitized distance of policy decks and supply-chain graphics, but from the inside: as a fragmented architecture where states, corporations, informal networks and infrastructure systems each control partial layers - without ever fully owning the whole.
And yes, that means looking at China too: as an actor that understood where real leverage sat in a system no one can fully dominate.
The illusion of structure in mining
The moment you look at it seriously, you start seeing the dirt, beyond the extraction.
At a distance, you are told resources are geographically mapped, supply chains are known and dependencies are identified.
This creates a simple mental model:
locate the resource → extract → process → deliver
Easy, right? But this model is misleading, because it assumes continuity. In reality, each step belongs to a different layer, governed by different constraints.
Mining is not primarily an extraction story. It is a logistics and waste-management system.
That matters because it changes the entire way you look at the sector.
The romantic image is metal coming out of the ground... But the operational reality is that most of the system is built around moving, processing, securing, separating and discarding enormous volumes of matter in order to isolate a very small amount of usable material.
To extract one ton of copper, you need to move on the order of a one to two hundreds tons of rock, depending on grade and stripping ratio. As Amanda put it simply:
Mining is basically a dirty, expensive, massive logistics operationn that is capital, energy and chemical intensive.
That makes mining dependent on roads, ports, power and transport and operationally fragile from the start.
Once you see that, the system stops looking linear. It becomes a stack of dependencies:
- geology
- extraction companies
- processing
- logistics
- energy
- chemicals
- refiners
- capital
- traders
- investors
- operators
- transport networks
- security actors
- lawyers
- lobbies
- governments
- local governments
- local populations
- informal producers
- sometimes criminal networks
And this list is still incomplete. All of these actors are different, interdependent, and, at best, only partially aligned.
No one owns the full system.
Each layer requires different capabilities, operates under different rules, and is shaped by different incentives and risks. Critically, they do not align.
That is where the Grey Zone starts.
Because when a system is this fragmented, this capital intensive, and this geographically dispersed, it cannot be fully governed.
So it becomes adaptive, negotiated and partially opaque. You get:
- informal mining
- parallel supply chains
- local arrangements
- hybrid legal/illegal flows and chokepoints
Not as anomalies. As structural features of the sector.
The real constraint is not where resources are.
The dominant narrative focuses on geography:
- cobalt → Congo
- lithium → South America
- rare earths → China
Amanda is clear:
There is no such thing as a 'geographical concentration' of critical minerals.
Her point being: don't confuse presence with accessibility. Resources exist in multiple places. What does not exist everywhere is:
- infrastructure
- processing capacity
- capital tolerance
- execution ability
The constraint is systemic, not geological.
This matters because it breaks the narrative that the world is "dependent" because resources are concentrated "somewhere".
In reality, many dependencies are man-made.
They are the result of underinvestment, permitting delays, missing infrastructure, political risk, low margins, and a widespread unwillingness in the West to handle heavy, dirty, low-return industrial processes.
So yes, some maps are striking. But maps alone explain very little... The real issue is not where the resource sits in the ground. It is whether the broader system around it can make that resource economically real, like for cobalt:
The largest cobalt resources on the planet are located in the deep sea, which the America is actively developing. If we crack successfully mine the deep sea, it has the potential to be the largest and cheapest supply cobalt in the world, available in the middle of international waters. No politics, no people, no Indonesia, no China, no African infrastructure challenges. Five years from now, the Congo and Indonesia might not matter.
Why the system cannot be "cleaned"
From discovery to production in the West, opening a mine now often takes 10 to 20 years.