Amazon, Rio Tinto team up on cleaner data center copper
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Tiffany Herring/Axios
Amazon is the inaugural buyer of copper cathode that mining giant Rio Tinto is producing with a special process it calls way more climate-friendly than traditional methods.
Why it matters: Data centers need lots of copper, and tech giants are looking to make powerful computing more sustainable as the AI boom complicates their climate goals.
- The Amazon-Rio Tinto deal comes as overall copper demand is rising, and growth of data centers could worsen what's already a looming shortfall in the decades ahead, a recent S&P Global report found.
Driving the news: Amazon has a two-year deal with Rio Tinto for its new Nuton copper product, while Amazon is providing cloud-based data and analytics support to help produce it. Terms weren't disclosed.
- "It's a phenomenal meeting of minds," Rio Tinto copper chief executive Katie Jackson told Axios.
- She touted Nuton's ability to bolster the domestic supply chain of copper — which the Trump administration classifies as a "critical mineral" — without the many years needed to permit new mines.
State of play: Rio Tinto late last year began using the process to extract copper from U.S. ores that are traditionally hard to process and often become waste.
- It involves using microorganisms — or "bioleaching" — to remove copper from sulphide ores.
- Rio Tinto is initially working at a once-dormant Gunnison Copper Corp. site in Arizona and hopes to deploy the tech elsewhere in North and South America.
The intrigue: The process "removes the need for traditional concentrators, smelters and refineries, significantly shortening the mine-to-market supply chain," today's announcement states.
- It also uses far less water — about 55% as much per unit of copper as the global industry average.
The big picture: Chris Roe, Amazon's director of worldwide carbon, called the deal a new frontier for his company's sustainability work.
- "We've spent a lot of time so far on steel and concrete, and so we're really excited to jump into copper, which is obviously a core commodity that feeds not only our data centers, but a lot of our operations across the world," he said.
Yes, but: Nuton is initially a tiny slice of Rio Tinto's output.
- The company expects to produce about 14,000 tons of Nuton over four years from Gunnison's Johnson Camp mine, Jackson said.
- Rio Tinto's global copper output was nearly 900,000 tons last year.
The bottom line: While the initial volumes are small, Jackson calls it a potentially transformative moment.
- "There's a huge amount of interest in this technology, because I think many in the industry see success as being something that's game changing," she said.
- Adds Roe: "Sending those demand signals early — if you build it, we will come — is a really important piece of this puzzle to unlock the scale that we know we all need for the climate crisis."
Sign up here for Axios' Future of Energy newsletter.
