Hyperdrive
Billionaires Are On the Hunt for New Underground Cobalt
- Breakthrough Energy, Andreessen Horowitz back Kobold Metals
- Startup is using big data to explore for the key battery metal
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A coalition of billionaires led by Bill Gates has thrown its financial weight behind a startup hoping to build a "Google Maps for the earth’s crust" to hunt for new sources of cobalt.
The startup, Kobold Metals, is using data-crunching algorithms to scour the globe for cobalt, in a bet that there may still be significant undiscovered sources of the metal that has become one of the world’s hot commodities thanks to its use in electric vehicle batteries.