Amazon Web Services signs up as first customer for Rio Tinto’s ‘greener’ copper venture Nuton

Jeff Bezos’ Amazon Web Services empire will buy the first batches of a purportedly less water and emissions intensive copper cathode from Rio Tinto to build US data centres.

The multi-trillion-dollar company is the first customer to sign up for the new product sourced from Gunnison Copper’s Johnson Camp mine in Arizona and processed by Rio’s Nuton venture.

It’s not clear how much of the 30,000t of copper planned to be produced from Nuton will over the next four years will be bought by Amazon under the agreement. The red metal is used in various parts of data centres including electrical cables, busbars, windings in transformers and motors, printed circuit boards, and heat sinks on processors.

Copper prices rallied to an all-time high earlier in January on the prospect of the commodity’s projected demand over the coming years as more electrification projects gain momentum.

Reports vary as to how many data centres Amazon runs, with some outlets reporting the number as over 900. in Australia the company has pledged to pour $20 billion into building new data centres.

Purchasing Rio’s copper is hoped to contribute to lower emissions intensity and water demands that go into running data centres for Amazon Web Services.

Rio makes the case that its Nuton tech is better for the environment than traditional smelting and concentrating copper purifying because it uses a “heap leaching” process — more common in gold mining — that typically uses chemicals such as cyanide to extract ore.

In using this method Rio claims water intensity is reduced to about 71 litres per kilogram of copper compared to a global average industry estimate of about 130 litres per kilogram of copper.

According to Rio the process also reduces the carbon footprint in producing a kilo of copper from an approximate 1.5kg to 8kg carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) to 2.82 kgCO₂e per kilogram of copper. This is also brought down by Rio buying “renewable energy certificates” to match the electricity it consumes on site.

Rio’s copper chief executive Katie Jackson said the Nuton technology had been shifted from an idea to industrial production.

“By bringing Nuton copper into AWS’s U.S. data-centre supply chain, we’re helping to strengthen domestic resilience and secure the critical materials those facilities need, closer to where they’re used,” she said.

Rio shares last changed hands at $147.79. The company is currently in the middle of negotiations with Glencore on a potential merger that would likely create the world’s biggest miner.