Canada has granted Italy priority access to its critical mineral reserves, reinforcing a year of bilateral deals including Eni’s nearly C$100 million offtake-linked investment in Nouveau Monde Graphite’s Matawinie graphite project in Québec and Italy’s entry into the Critical Minerals Production Alliance. Rome plans to collaborate with Ottawa on stockpiling, with a clear focus on battery metals and defence-related inputs such as graphite, nickel and rare earths. Parallel talks cover Canada’s planned purchase of Leonardo M‑346 advanced jet trainers and a proposed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank to finance long-term defence projects.

Scott Technology has secured a major contract to supply an Automated Modular Solution (AMS) crush cell to one of the world’s largest testing, inspection and certification providers, its first deployment of the Rocklabs AMS platform in a large-scale commercial minerals laboratory rather than an on-site mine lab. The modular crush cell automates sample receiving, crushing and splitting, aiming to standardise preparation workflows and reduce manual handling in high-throughput commercial assay operations. For geometallurgy and grade control teams, this signals growing availability of off-the-shelf automation in third‑party lab chains, not just bespoke mine-site systems.

ABB has launched Grinding Connect, a global digital service suite for gearless mill drive (GMD) systems that aggregates real-time condition data from critical grinding assets into a secure cloud platform. The service enables remote diagnostics, anomaly detection and predictive maintenance scheduling for large SAG and ball mills, aiming to cut unplanned GMD outages and optimise planned shutdowns. For process and maintenance engineers, the key change is earlier visibility of drive and stator issues, allowing targeted inspections and spares planning rather than time-based overhauls.