Mariana Minerals stood up a 400-acre autonomous copper mine on private 5G in ~35 days

About Mariana Minerals

The U.S. imports about half the copper it refines, while demand from data centers, the grid, EVs, and defense climbs sharply — and new mines can't come online fast enough on legacy tooling. That's the backdrop for Mariana Minerals, a Bay Area, software-first minerals company that engineers, builds, and operates its own mines and refineries, using proprietary AI/ML to move faster. Copper One, its copper mine and refinery in San Juan County, Utah, is where Mariana set out to run an autonomy-first operation. As co-founder and CEO Turner Caldwell puts it: "The U.S. has a copper problem and a narrow window to fix it." Closing that window starts with connectivity across the whole site.

What they needed, and how fast

Mariana came to Celona with a clear ask: full wireless coverage across roughly 400 acres of open-pit terrain, replacing legacy Wi-Fi and manual data collection — and they needed it quickly. The site runs a lot of automation, from autonomous drills to workers with handhelds to haul equipment, and the operation depends on knowing precisely where every asset is at any moment. That isn't only an efficiency question. Copper One runs planned blasts in different locations, so real-time positioning of people and machines is a safety requirement.

A private 5G backbone for MarianaOS

Instead of stitching together Wi-Fi across the pit, Celona put down a single private 5G layer built for industrial performance. The whole 400-acre site is covered by just five outdoor radios. Data flows continuously into MarianaOS, Mariana's software-defined mining platform, where it powers real-time monitoring, analytics, and decisions across the operation. At go-live the network already carried fleet and asset tracking, precision drill-coordinate feeds to autonomous drilling equipment, and remote control of autonomous drills — a single operator can manage multiple drills from the control room.

Live in about 35 days

The speed came from the architecture. Celona is an edgeless AerFlex deployment: no on-site edge appliance to rack and configure — the five radios connect straight into the existing switches, over whatever backhaul the site already has, including Starlink. That simplicity showed up in the timeline:

• The RF plan was ready the day after the first call, the bill of materials was set within days, and the PO was issued by the end of the first week.
• The partner pre-staged the equipment and shipped it to site.
• Celona was on site for the survey to fix the exact radio locations.
• The radios went up on poles, and bring-up and validation wrapped shortly after.

Roughly 35 days, first conversation to a live network covering the whole mine.

Foundation for what's next

Reliable, site-wide connectivity is the foundation Mariana's autonomy-first roadmap builds on: self-driving haul trucks, real-time geological data feeding back to the control room, and continuous updates to the site's digital twin that improve drilling accuracy and fragmentation. The private 5G layer supports not just today's tracking and monitoring, but future automation, machine learning, and more autonomous systems. Copper One is Mariana's second active project, alongside Lithium One, a GWh-scale lithium extraction facility under construction in East Texas.