Horizon 1 The AI build-out
A data centre is a copper mine running backwards.
Nine subsystems around one megawatt of IT load. Compute is electricity, electricity is metal, and the metal is mostly copper.
Turn the model, pull it apart, click any component, or filter by a single mineral. Nothing here is a resource statement. It is a search image, which is a different and earlier thing.
Interactive
The exploded view
Drag to turn the model and scroll to zoom. Run the slider from assembled to exploded. Click a component to see what it is made of and whether we hold ground for it, or pick a mineral to light up every place it appears.
A real-time 3D model, built to the subsystem breakdown below rather than copied from any manufacturer. Proportions and part shapes are representative. The numbered component list under the model is the keyboard route through it, and the fallback if your browser cannot run WebGL.
How to read the four tiers. "Ground held" means we have lodged an application over ground selected for that mineral. "Co-target" means our ground is the right geological style to carry it and we intend to assay for it, but we have not yet done so and we make no claim that it is there. "Search image" means it is on our list and we are building the targeting method, with no tenure behind it. "Not pursued" means it is a real input and we have no position and are not looking.
Mass balance
What one megawatt eats
Per megawatt of IT load. A hyperscale campus is commonly 100 to 1,000 MW, so multiply accordingly. Provenance is marked on every row.
| Material | Per MW | Principally in | Provenance | Our position |
|---|
Published = stated by a named third party. Derived = arithmetic on a published figure, with the step shown. Indicative = order of magnitude only, no source, shown so the component is not silently missing.
Copper and aluminium intensities after published data-centre build figures including Microsoft's Chicago site; steel apportioned from campus-level tonnages. Battery attach rates from our own August 2026 demand work. Everything marked Indicative is our own order-of-magnitude estimate and should be read at that confidence.
The Honest Footnote
Copper is the real story here and we hold ground for it. But a data centre is not a critical-minerals showcase: by mass it is overwhelmingly steel and concrete, and the exotic elements that make the headlines are present in kilograms, not tonnes.
The rare-earth line is small. Data centres matter to the magnet market through the sheer number of fan and pump motors, not through intensity, and our own demand work puts them well behind robotics and vehicles on that measure.
All seventeen Queensland applications are applications. None is granted. There is no mineral resource, no ore reserve and no JORC public report behind anything shown here.