Vertical: Mining
Application: Autonomous drilling, autonomous haul trucks, asset tracking, real-time monitoring, remote equipment management, digital twin
Ecosystem: Celona
Private Network: 5G
Mariana Minerals describes itself as the world’s only software-first vertically integrated minerals company — a designation that signals something meaningful about how it approaches operations. When the company needed a connectivity foundation for its Copper One mine and refinery in southeastern Utah, it turned to Celona, a California-based provider of private 5G solutions founded in 2019 and backed by a $60 million Series C round led by DigitalBridge Ventures in 2022. The result is a private 5G network now running across Copper One’s operations, built on Celona’s 5G LAN platform.
The choice to move beyond legacy Wi-Fi and manual data collection reflects a practical recognition of what modern industrial environments demand. Mining terrain is unforgiving — distances are long, conditions are harsh, and gaps in connectivity translate directly into operational blind spots. Celona’s 5G LAN provides a unified wireless layer across the site, delivering the low-latency, high-bandwidth performance needed to keep equipment, sensors, and edge systems in constant communication.
At the center of Mariana’s operation is MarianaOS, the company’s software-defined mining platform. The private 5G network serves as its communications backbone, feeding it a continuous stream of data from across the site. That data powers real-time monitoring, analytics, and operational decision-making — including transmitting optimized drill patterns to autonomous drilling equipment and orchestrating self-driving haul trucks with precision. A single operator can remotely manage multiple autonomous drills simultaneously, with geological data flowing back to the control room in real time to continuously refine the site’s digital twin and improve drilling accuracy and fragmentation outcomes.
Rajeev Shah, co-founder and CEO of Celona, framed the stakes plainly: “Modern mining requires more than automation – it requires deterministic, secure connectivity between every system in the operation. By deploying 5G LAN at Copper One, Mariana is building the critical infrastructure needed to support AI-driven operations at scale.”
The broader context gives the deployment added weight. The US currently imports roughly half of its refined copper, and domestic demand is projected to nearly double by 2035, driven by AI infrastructure, energy storage, defense systems, electric vehicles, and grid modernization. That supply gap has made the ability to scale efficient, technology-enabled mining a national priority. Turner Caldwell, co-founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals, put it directly: “The US has a copper problem and a narrow window to fix it. Celona 5G LAN gives us the connectivity foundation required to run a modern mining operation – one where every asset is connected and every decision is driven by real-time data.”
