Upstream aluminium — the cooling, racking and grid-conductor metal of the data-centre build-out, by volume rather than as a bottleneck
AI exposure 2% — derived from reported segment revenue, not asserted.
Energy Supply & Critical Minerals → Critical Minerals & Base Metals · figures rebased to Q3 2026, reported 2026-10-15
Alcoa produces bauxite, alumina and primary aluminium, which is what Critical Minerals & Base Metals holds — "the miners and producers of the physical materials AI infrastructure is built from". Aluminum is 83.9% of Q2 2026 third-party sales and Alumina 16.1%, both in this sub-tier. It passes the test that removed Almonty because AI is a documented demand driver for the metal: Wood Mackenzie puts data-centre aluminium at 0.6 to 0.9 million tonnes a year at peak, mostly cooling and racking, plus facility power and grid conductors, and calls it co-dependent expansion with copper. No on-map customer is named, as for the copper miners, so its edges are inferred. Reviewed 2026-10.
Alcoa (Q3 2026 revenue $3,704M, +23.7% against $2,995M a year earlier and -7% sequentially) is integrated bauxite, alumina and primary aluminium. Third-party sales split Aluminum $3,021M = 81.6% and Alumina $680M ($85M bauxite + $595M alumina) = 18.4%. The AI case is volume, not scarcity: Wood Mackenzie (16 June 2026) puts aluminium inside data centres at a peak of 0.6 to 0.9 million tonnes a year in the early 2030s — about 55% cooling, 25% racking and enclosures — roughly doubled by facility power systems, with grid conductors on top, and calls it co-dependent expansion with copper rather…
Moat. Upstream aluminum scale (bauxite-alumina-aluminum integration) but a commodity producer with energy-cost + cyclical exposure; no durable pricing moat.
Bottleneck / pricing power. Not a bottleneck for AI: aluminium is abundant and the data-centre share of demand is small. The tightness that matters is Western supply — China makes 60% of the world's primary aluminium, more than 2,500 kmt of Middle East smelting capacity has been curtailed since the conflict began, and data centres compete with smelters for the same cheap power.
Role in the AI stack. The aluminum (cooling/structure/grid-conductor) layer.
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