Amazon Partners with Gunnison and Rio Tinto for Sustainable Data Center Materials
Tech giant secures low-carbon copper from Arizona bio-mine to fuel AI expansion while Rio Tinto leverages AWS analytics to optimize the microbial workforce.
If you thought the cloud was comprised solely of code and vapor, think again. The infrastructure powering your next AI query is grounded in heavy metal, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) just secured a shiny new supply of it from an unlikely workforce: bacteria.
On Thursday, the tech giant struck a definitive agreement to become the first commercial customer of copper produced by Nuton, a venture backed by mining heavyweight Rio Tinto. The two-year deal will see AWS sourcing copper cathodes from the Johnson Camp mine in Arizona, operated by Canada’s Gunnison Copper, to wire up its sprawling US data center operations.
The partnership arrives just as analysts are sounding the alarm on a looming copper squeeze. As the artificial intelligence sector devours power and hardware, the demand for the red metal, essential for electrical cables, transformers, and heat sinks, is outpacing what traditional dig-and-burn mining can supply. Amazon’s solution isn’t just to buy more copper, but to buy smarter copper.

