Alaska won up to $160M to hunt critical minerals with AI and microbes

Alaska is sitting on a resource the U.S. badly wants: 56 of the 60 minerals the government considers critical — the raw materials behind batteries, electronics, clean energy, and defense.

Now it has up to $160 million in federal money to go after them in some distinctly futuristic ways. The National Science Foundation picked the University of Alaska Fairbanks to lead a new "innovation engine" built around finding and extracting those minerals — using artificial intelligence to hunt for deposits, and biomining, which enlists microbes to pull metals out of rock.

The project, one of 12 chosen nationwide and anchored at UAF's Geophysical Institute under geoscientist Lee Ann Munk, pairs the university with partners including the University of Alaska Anchorage, the Native regional corporation NANA, and a biomining firm called Endolith. The idea is to make exploration and extraction faster, cheaper, and less destructive than digging it all up the old way — and to build the workforce for it in remote Alaska communities.

Alaska Native organizations are far from unified on this. For many Native corporations, resource development is a core business — a major source of the revenue that funds their dividends and programs — so NANA's role reflects a broad reality, not a lone exception. Others, including some Native organizations and environmental advocates, warn that a critical-minerals rush can threaten Indigenous land rights and subsistence resources without real Indigenous governance and strict safeguards.

And the money isn't guaranteed. The $160 million is a ceiling stretched over a decade, dependent on Congress keeping the funding flowing.