California is no stranger to fortune-seekers. The state was founded on the Gold Rush and built by the Oil Boom.

Silicon Valley is our latest El Dorado. Our tech overlords have a new hype wand. They call it AI. And no one wields the gilded baton better than Santa Clara’s NVIDIA.

The computer systems and computer programs that make up what we call AI need the best chips, and NVIDIA makes them. Of course these massive projects have an equally massive energy demand. We don’t see the carbon and environmental footprint of the tech industry and that gives them an unassailable clean image. The Gold Rush and the Oil Boom spawned a lot of environmental laws, by comparison. Big Tech off-shores all its dirty work, and their toxins seep quietly into the groundwater.

NVIDIA is now the most valuable company in the world. Or maybe not. These things change on a whim.

Frik Els over at mining.com put together a graphic comparing the market capitalization of the fifty biggest mining companies in the world to one tech company, NVIDIA. There’s no comparison. All fifty companies combined just tops a trillion dollars (~$1.4T). NVIDIA is worth more than twice that!

You can’t have AI or Big Tech without copper and silicon and aluminum and gold and germanium and gallium and arsenic and so on. And so on and so on. Minerals are the basis of society. That is, all the non-food aspects of society. What can’t be grown must be mined. And without mining there’s no modern agriculture.

But AI is the stuff of dreams. And that beats digging holes in the ground any day.