The Elements of Innovation Discovered
Metal Tech News – August 24. 2026
Copper-telluride filter cake produced at Rio Tinto’s Kennecott mining and refining operation in Utah.
Thin-film cadmium-telluride solar, such as these First Solar panels in Texas, make up roughly 40% of all utility-scale photovoltaic installations in the U.S.
Tellurium-based thermoelectric generators could transform data center waste heat into clean electricity to help power them.
PyroDelta is applying the same type of thermoelectric device it designed for the radiator systems in ICE vehicles to generate electricity from the waste heat generated by data centers.
While copper is critical to wiring data centers and the expanded electrical systems they demand, a tar-like sludge left behind during copper refining contains another much rarer element important to artificial intelligence and the energy transition – tellurium.
This rare metalloid has long been treated as a curiosity seldom discussed outside geology or chemistry classrooms. That obscurity, however, is fading as solar manufacturers, energy researchers, and technology developers find new ways to leverage tellurium’s unusual ability to help transform light and heat into electricity.
Tellurium is a metalloid, a group of semimetals with traits that fall between metals and non-metals. These elements possess natural semiconducting properties that make them essential to modern technology and energy systems.
Most everyone has heard of silicon, and a growing number of Americans are concerned about the nation’s heavy reliance on China for antimony and germanium. Tellurium seldom makes headline news, but it already plays a critical role in U.S. solar manufacturing and has demonstrated potential to convert waste heat into zero-emission electricity – an ability that may eventually help cool and power AI data centers.
Despite its extreme scarcity – only about three parts per billion in Earth’s upper crust – tellurium is commonly found alongside copper. This means the rare metalloid often enters the supply chain with the much more familiar red metal. Recovering it from that supply chain, however, is a separate challenge – one Rio Tinto has tackled at its iconic Kennecott mine and smelting complex in Utah.
Thin-film cadmium-telluride solar, such as these First Solar panels in Texas, make up roughly 40% of all utility-scale photovoltaic installations in the U.S.
Tellurium has been present in Kennecott’s copper stream for more than a century, but only recently has Rio Tinto recovered it as a commercial product. This timeline demonstrates the delicate balance mining and refining companies must achieve when producing critical minerals that occur as minor byproducts.
Metals producers must weigh the cost of recovering these byproducts against the market. Is there enough demand and price support to justify the added processing? For most of Kennecott’s history, the answer for tellurium was no.
The rise of First Solar and its U.S. production of high-efficiency cadmium-telluride, or CdTe, thin-film solar panels changed that supply-demand equation.
CdTe technology accounted for about 40% of the U.S. utility-scale photovoltaic market in 2025, according to the U.S. Manufacturing of Advanced Cadmium Telluride Photovoltaics Consortium, a group formed to accelerate CdTe solar technologies.
This market momentum prompted Rio Tinto to investigate the potential of recovering tellurium from anode slimes, the metals-enriched residue that accumulates during copper refining.
In 2019, the international mining and refining company began building a circuit to recover tellurium from this slime. The circuit produces copper telluride, an intermediate product that can be further processed into the high-purity tellurium and tellurium compounds used in CdTe solar panels and other specialty applications.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. copper telluride is produced from tellurium-bearing anode slimes, and the material is shipped to third parties for further processing into refined tellurium products.
This domestic recovery has helped reduce America’s reliance on tellurium imports. U.S. net import reliance fell from more than 95% in 2021 to around 25% in 2025.
With the energy and high-tech sectors pushing new demand for a wider range of mined materials, Rio Tinto is recovering and investigating the recovery of additional minor metals and metalloids from its mines and refineries. This includes scandium production from its aluminum operations in Canada and studies into the potential recovery of bismuth from waste streams at Kennecott.
“The minerals and metals we produce are essential to accelerate the transition to renewable energy,” said Kennecott Managing Director Nate Foster. “We’re committed to using innovation to reduce waste in our production process and extract as much value as possible from the material that we mine and process.”
Tellurium-based thermoelectric generators could transform data center waste heat into clean electricity to help power them.
The tellurium Rio Tinto is recovering from Kennecott copper slime may also have an important role to play in both cooling and energizing AI data centers.
The race to meet the growing computational demands of AI, machine learning, and cloud-based data storage has raised significant worries over the amount of electricity and water consumed by the enormous data centers being built around the world.
The International Energy Agency estimates that global data center electricity consumption was about 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 and is projected to roughly double to around 945 TWh by 2030.
A tellurium-based thermoelectric generator being developed by PyroDelta Energy Inc. could offer one approach to this energy-efficiency challenge by converting a portion of the waste heat from high-powered computing hubs into electricity.
“AI data centers not only consume large amounts of energy, they also generate enormous amounts of heat,” said PyroDelta Chief Engineer Michael Abdelmaseh. “The industry is focused on ways it can use that heat to reduce power loads and also become more efficient.”
PyroDelta is applying some of the same broad semiconducting characteristics that make tellurium useful in solar and thermoelectric materials to a technology aimed at one of the biggest drains on energy efficiency – waste heat.
Thermoelectric generators are solid-state devices that generate electricity from differences in temperature. Traditionally, these devices have been used to harvest waste heat from factories and to power deep-space probes by converting heat generated by plutonium decay into electricity.
PyroDelta is applying the same type of thermoelectric device it designed for the radiator systems in ICE vehicles to generate electricity from the waste heat generated by data centers.
Whether it comes from a traditional car engine, EV motor, home computer, or 100-megawatt data center, waste heat is an energy-loss byproduct. Not only does this represent lost energy potential, but in most cases additional energy is expended to run the fans, water pumps, and other systems used to get rid of that heat.
Though applications in homes, factories, offices, transportation, and industry are enormous, PyroDelta sees data centers as one area where its tellurium-enhanced thermoelectric devices could have a meaningful impact.
The company believes a thermoelectric generator similar to the tubular design it has developed to harvest electricity from internal combustion engine radiator systems could be adapted to data centers – turning a portion of the excess heat generated by server banks into electricity that can help power operations while reducing cooling demands.
PyroDelta says it has developed a prototype designed to convert waste heat from data centers into electricity, and that testing at an operating facility is the next step toward proving the technology in a real-world setting.
The company’s tellurium-enabled technology has attracted attention from the Pentagon, the Canadian government, Microsoft, the National Science Foundation, and a solution-based environmental nonprofit seeking to help advance commercial technologies that reduce waste and improve energy efficiency.
Considering that it is estimated that 20 to 50% of all energy consumed worldwide is lost as waste heat, PyroDelta’s thermoelectric generators point to another potential demand driver for tellurium – converting an unavoidable byproduct of data-driven 21st-century technologies into a new source of clean electricity.
With more than 18 years of covering mining, Shane is renowned for his insights and in-depth analysis of mining, mineral exploration, and technology metals.
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