“Silicon Valley cares about this because data centers are made of metal. That’s it,” one executive at a mining start-up tells me. “A hundred million dollars is literally nothing in the mining industry,” says Robert Friedland, the billionaire founder of Ivanhoe Mines. “I mean, just on one project in Mongolia, just to see whether the metal was there, we’d spend a couple billion dollars drilling.” “Digging up ore is a totally different thing than whether you can raise money in Silicon Valley,” Bazilian says.