Tony Giardini

Tony Giardini is President and Chief Executive Officer of Trilogy Metals, the developer advancing the high-grade Arctic and Bornite copper deposits in Alaska's Ambler Mining District. He leads the company at a moment when the United States government has put its own capital behind that work: in September 2026 the Department of War closed a US$35.6 million equity investment, becoming a roughly 10% shareholder of Trilogy. For resource investors, his company has become a live test of how US federal policy and money reach a critical-minerals project.

Giardini has spent about four decades in mining finance. He was Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Kinross Gold, a senior gold producer, from December 2012 to April 2019. Before that, he was CFO of Ivanhoe Mines from 2006 to 2012 — Robert Friedland's mining group during the period it discovered the Kamoa copper district in the Democratic Republic of Congo — and he returned as President of Ivanhoe Mines in May 2019 as the company moved from explorer toward producer. Earlier, he spent 12 years at KPMG and more than 10 years at Placer Dome, including as Vice President and Treasurer. He has served on the board of Alamos Gold since 2024 and is a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA, CA).

At Trilogy, his approach is to pair project economics with de-risked access. Arctic is a volcanogenic massive sulfide (VMS — a metal-rich body formed on the ancient seafloor) carrying copper, zinc, lead, silver and gold, held in a 50/50 joint venture with South32 alongside a cooperation agreement with NANA Regional Corporation, the Alaska Native regional company for northwest Alaska. Trilogy's updated feasibility study, released in February 2023, outlined an after-tax NPV (Net Present Value — what a project's future cash flows are worth today) of about US$1.1 billion at an 8% discount rate, with an internal rate of return near 23%. Giardini has framed 2026 as an execution year: a fully funded field program, permitting preparation, and converting federal support — the October 2025 executive order restoring the 211-mile Ambler Access Project road, a FAST-41 designation that speeds federal permitting reviews, and the Department of War investment — into financing and, eventually, a build decision.

For investors tracking copper, cobalt and US critical-minerals policy, following Giardini means watching how those milestones land: road financing with the state of Alaska and the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA), federal permit decisions, and work program results from the joint venture. Trilogy's quarterly releases and his interviews lay out the path from federal backing to mine development in concrete terms.