Tantalum Strategy was built to close the gap between what the Southern Hemisphere holds and what the AI economy needs.
An independent research desk benchmarking the materials that power artificial intelligence, anchored in a perspective the rest of the market consistently underweights.
Why this exists
The global conversation about AI is priced in compute. GPUs, model size, FLOPs, tokens per second. That pricing is real. But every unit of compute sits on top of a physical economy that the market talks about much less: the materials, the power, and the supply chains that allow a data center to exist at all.
Compute is the front of the story. Materials are the part of the story most investors haven't priced yet.
Copper for data center power grids. Rare earth magnets for cooling and motors. Helium for semiconductor lithography. Lithium for backup storage. Niobium for the high temperature steel in transmission infrastructure. These materials concentrate in a small number of geographies, many of them in the Global South, and many of them in Brazil.
The Brazil angle
Brazil sits at the center of the AI materials story in a way the market has missed.
- NiobiumRoughly 90% of global supply, mostly through CBMM in Araxá. There is no AI grade steel without it.
- Rare earthsThe world's third largest known reserves. Monazite in the Northeast. Serra Verde came online as the first commercial REE producer outside China and Australia in 2024.
- LithiumThe Lithium Valley in Vale do Jequitinhonha (Minas Gerais) is positioned as the next major spodumene basin outside Australia.
- Helium potentialUnder explored gas reservoirs in the Solimões and Parnaíba basins.
- Iron ore, copper, graphite, manganeseMajor producers with infrastructure already at scale.
Brazil doesn't yet capture the value its geology offers. The country exports raw materials and imports finished products like magnets, batteries, and semiconductors, at orders of magnitude in markup. The downstream processing infrastructure isn't there. Capital allocation is misaligned. The policy clock moves slowly.
How we operate
Tantalum Strategy publishes three things: proprietary indexes tracking the AI materials economy, weekly research on the supply, policy, and capital flows that move it, and bespoke advisory work for builders, investors, and policymakers operating in the space.
The desk operates from a global perspective with deep Brazilian roots. Coverage spans US policy (IRA, DPA, FEOC), Chinese export controls and overseas equity moves, the Lithium Triangle, the African Copperbelt, Australian iron and lithium, and sovereign positioning. The unique angle is the Southern Hemisphere asset base.
We are AI led. Our research desk uses large language models to scan, draft, and synthesize at scale, paired with human editorial judgment. The result is more research, faster, openly published.
The founder
Priscilla Avila is the founder of Tantalum Strategy. Brazilian. Based in California, with sources and ground level coverage anchored across Brazil and the global resource desks. The desk was built from a question she kept coming back to. Why does the AI conversation focus almost entirely on the compute layer and not the physical economy underneath it, and how is Brazil, which holds many of the keys, positioning for what comes next?
For advisory work, institutional index access, or press inquiries: Talk to the desk →
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