Prysmian, Rio Tinto to Supply Amazon Ohio Data Center with Low-Carbon Aluminum Cabling

Italian cable manufacturer Prysmian and Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto have partnered to supply an Amazon data center in Ohio with low-carbon aluminum electrical cables, in what marks the first deployment of such material within a data center environment.

The aluminum will be produced by Elysis, a joint venture between Rio Tinto and U.S. aluminum producer Alcoa. The Elysis process replaces traditional carbon anodes with proprietary inert materials during aluminum smelting, eliminating greenhouse gas emissions and releasing pure oxygen as a byproduct instead of carbon dioxide and perfluorocarbons. Prysmian will use the low-carbon aluminum to manufacture electrical cables at its Sedalia, Missouri, facility, with Wesco supporting the distribution and delivery of the cabling to the project site. The exact data center where the cables will be deployed has not been disclosed.

The agreement underscores the growing pressure on data center operators to decarbonize their supply chains as the industry's carbon footprint expands alongside its rapid capacity growth. Amazon operates multiple data centers in Ohio and is building several others as part of plans to spend $23 billion in the state by 2030, making the choice of construction materials a significant lever for reducing the environmental impact of its infrastructure buildout.

Joern Tinnemeyer, vice president of data center engineering at Amazon Web Services, said the company aims to reach net-zero emissions across its operations by 2040 through decarbonizing its operations and supply chain down to the raw materials. "Traditionally, making aluminum is carbon-intensive, but this wire was made with technology that emits oxygen instead of carbon dioxide and perfluorocarbons," he said. "Prysmian, Rio Tinto, and Wesco are showing that lower-carbon materials aren't a future concept – they're here and going into Amazon data centers today."

Srinivas Siripurapu, chief sustainability, R&D, and innovation officer for Prysmian, added that the data center industry needs advanced technologies like this: "cables that can effectively carry power, meet high-quality standards, and make a positive impact on the sustainability of the entire value chain."

This is the second deal signed between Amazon and Rio Tinto on the supply of low-carbon materials. In January, AWS inked an agreement with the mining firm to supply low-carbon copper produced using its Nuton bioleaching technology for AWS data centers in the U.S. Amazon has also signed other deals within the low-carbon building space, including an agreement with Brimstone, a low-carbon cement company based in Oakland, California, to reserve volumes of its cement last year. The latest partnership signals a broader trend among hyperscale operators to lock in supplies of sustainable construction materials as they race to build out AI-ready data center capacity across the United States.