Artificial Intelligence helped to find a vast source of the copper that AI needs to thrive

CHILILABOMBWE, ZAMBIA: Peering into their computer screens in California last year, the data crunchers watched a subterranean fortune come into focus.

What they saw transported them 10,000 miles across the world, to Zambia, and then 1 more mile straight down into Earth. A rich lode of copper, deep in the bedrock, appeared before them, its contours revealed by a complex artificial intelligence-driven technology they had been painstakingly building for years.