Tesla and BHP Partner Up
Anglo-Australian mining firm BHP said Thursday it had reached a deal to provide Tesla with supplies of nickel -- a metal vital in producing high-powered batteries for electric cars.
Under the agreement, the innovative carmaker will lock in supplies from a mine in Western Australia, one of the world's largest sources.
Most nickel today is used in the production of stainless steel.
But demand for the metal is projected to explode over the next decade, as electric vehicles become more common.
Mercurial Tesla CEO Elon Musk has previously voiced concern about future nickel shortages -- which could put a brake on the efficiency and storage capacity of batteries, as well as making them more costly to produce.
BHP chief commercial officer Vandita Pant predicted demand will "grow by over 500 percent over the next decade" in large part thanks to the nickel-for-batteries business.
No details of the duration or value of the deal were disclosed.
President Joe Biden's administration has prodded US companies to develop supply chains that are not overly reliant on raw materials or production facilities in China that are vulnerable to diplomatic crosswinds.
Australia holds around a quarter of the world's nickel supply.
Tesla recently reached a similar supply deal with the Goro nickel mine in New Caledonia.
A raft of Chinese companies are vying to challenge Tesla's position as the world's leading electric car producer, including BYD, Nio, Li Auto and XPeng -- which this month listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate
A model in the hands of someone who has read the filing and walked the plant is a clerk. The same model, speaking for someone who has done neither, is a disguise. On AI slop, phantom citations and factslop, why finish stopped being evidence of work, and the containment layer KXCO built so a machine cannot speak as the institution until a source is attached.
Worthship: Do Not Conform to the Age
Worthship is the older English word for worship, and it means to ascribe worth. Bishop Robert Barron preached Romans 12 on 30 August. This essay follows the text into the prison letters, and puts two questions to a graph: do the four readings of that Sunday agree, and was Paul free or in chains when he wrote about despair?
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.