Trump’s Greenland Obsession May Be About Extracting Metals for Tech Billionaires – by Lucas Ropek (Gizmodo.com – January 30, 2025)

https://gizmodo.com/

The great battle for Greenland is probably all about resources to make apps like ChatGPT better.

Our new president’s obsession with buying Greenland has inspired jeers, laughs, and jokes about the cost of eggs, but more and more, the attempted procurement looks less like a joke and more like a big handout for the tech companies that backed him during the election. Multiple new reports show that some of Donald Trump’s most prominent financial benefactors have long been pursuing financial opportunities in the Arctic nation.

The Lever reports on the activities of KoBold Metals, a startup that is actively engaged in mining Greenland for raw materials that can be used to build AI products. KoBold, which is based in Berkeley, California, and uses AI to hunt for metals like cobalt, lithium, copper, and nickel, is basically the property of the tech industry’s most powerful executives.

Recent White House visitors Jeff Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have all invested in KoBold. Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has helped out with Elon Musk’s DOGE and who heartily supported Trump during the election, also has a large interest in Kobold. So does Microsoft magnate Bill Gates, despite his less charitable views of Trump.

For the rest of this article: https://gizmodo.com/trumps-greenland-obsession-may-be-about-extracting-metals-for-tech-billionaires-2000557117