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    AWS as first Nuton copper customer: project and leach design notes for engineers

    January 15, 2026|

    Reviewed by Joe Ashwell

    First reported on International Mining – News

    30 Second Briefing

    Rio Tinto has signed a two-year strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services under which AWS will purchase the first copper produced using Rio’s Nuton® bioleaching technology from the recently commissioned industrial-scale operation at the Johnson Camp copper mine in Arizona, USA. Nuton targets low-grade and complex sulphide ores using proprietary bioleach chemistry and bacterial consortia to recover copper from waste and tailings that are uneconomic with conventional heap leach or flotation. The deal gives Nuton an anchor offtake customer and an early commercial reference for scaling the technology to other brownfield copper sites.

    Technical Brief

    • Under the two-year agreement, AWS will use the first Nuton copper ever produced.

    Our Take

    Rio Tinto’s Nuton deployment at the Johnson Camp copper mine in the US fits a pattern in our database where copper pieces tagged ‘Sustainability’ increasingly focus on extracting value from legacy or marginal assets rather than greenfield builds.

    Having Amazon Web Services as an early Nuton customer signals that Rio Tinto is positioning this copper technology as an exportable service platform, not just an internal processing tool, which could open a separate revenue stream alongside its traditional mining operations in the United States.

    Among the 164 copper-tagged items in our coverage, relatively few involve large cloud providers like AWS, suggesting this move could accelerate data-intensive, remote optimisation models for US copper operations if the pilot proves technically and commercially robust.

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    Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.

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