For decades, finding new geothermal power sites meant drilling blindly into the desert, hoping to hit hot rock. Now a startup called Zanskar has used AI to do what seemed impossible: locate a geothermal reservoir with no surface signs — and prove it's commercially viable.
The site, buried 2,700 feet beneath the Nevada desert and nicknamed "Big Blind," reaches 250°F and has the permeable rock needed to move heat to the surface. It's the first confirmed discovery of its kind in over 30 years.
Finding heat in the darkness
Traditionally, geothermal exploration was brute force. Companies drilled expensive wells across large areas, betting on geology and luck. Zanskar's approach is radically different. The team trains AI models on known geothermal hotspots and geological simulations, then feeds the system satellite imagery, fault-line data, and subsurface information. The neural networks learn patterns humans can't easily spot — even in the chaos of complex geological data.
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Start Your News Detox"If there's something learnable in the earth, neural nets are capable of learning that, if given enough data," says Carl Hoiland, Zanskar's cofounder and CEO.
Once the AI flags a potential site, field crews move in to validate the prediction. They drill shallow test holes, measure underground temperatures, and gather physical evidence. For Big Blind, that fieldwork confirmed what the models predicted. The company then secured a federal lease, brought in large drill rigs, and in July and August confirmed the hot, permeable rock at depth.
This matters because geothermal plants deliver constant, zero-emission power — no weather dependency like solar or wind, no fuel costs like fossil plants. As global electricity demand climbs, that reliability becomes increasingly valuable. Zanskar says it has identified dozens of similar prospects using the same methodology.
The discovery has caught the attention of the Department of Energy's Utah FORGE program. "There's a tremendous need for methodology that can look for large-scale features," says John McLennan, the program's technical lead for resource management. Big Blind, he notes, is "promising."
Zanskar isn't stopping here. The company has already announced another geothermal discovery at a previously explored but undeveloped site, and purchased a geothermal plant in New Mexico. "This is the start of a wave of new, naturally occurring geothermal systems," says Joel Edwards, Zanskar's cofounder and CTO.
The Nevada site still needs grid connection permits and investment capital before it generates power. But the harder part — finding the heat in the first place — is solved.
