Amazon Web Services (AWS) has signed a two-year pact with Rio Tinto’s bioleaching arm, Nuton, to pull cleaner copper from the Johnson Camp mine. This isn’t your grandpa’s smelting operation—it’s a biotech hack that slashes carbon emissions and water use like a degen cutting losses on a bad trade. AWS gets to be the first buyer of this greener metal, which will be wired into its US data centers, while also throwing its cloud computing muscle into the mix to help optimize Nuton’s operations.
Rio Tinto’s copper boss Katie Jackson called this a marriage of industrial muscle and cloud brains, noting that Nuton’s sprint from a whiteboard sketch to actual production—turbocharged by AWS’s analytics—will speed up the optimization loop. Amazon’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst added that this fundamentally different copper production method is a key piece of its 2040 net-zero puzzle, helping to decarbonize its own operations and harden its supply chain as data centers keep multiplying like rabbits.
