Companies in the booming artificial-intelligence field have a massive appetite for the world’s purest aluminium materials, produced by an Australian firm in Queensland. Now set to expand to a facility 30 times the size of its current operation, Alpha HPA uses solvent extraction to produce ultra high-purity aluminium materials, undetectable levels of thorium and uranium.
Alpha HPA uses solvent extraction for purification of the aluminium, says managing director Rob Williamson, a process invented by a Queenslander with expertise in metallurgy.
Alpha HPA has the exclusive licence to this chemical technology, and their experts worked with the inventor to develop the technology – moving from a benchtop scale of work to the sophisticated technology used commercially in the currently operational stage one facility in Gladstone. Already producing high-purity aluminium materials at this smaller facility, Alpha HPA is pushing ahead with construction of a massive expansion on the next door site, due for commissioning by the end of 2027.
“We started up in late 2022 at the stage one facility, a 24/7 operation with about 50 employees at the time,” Williamson says. “Now we have over 170 employees.”
Aluminium materials products now claimed to be >99.995 per cent pure, are measured in parts per million.
The Alpha HPA process goes much, much further, with a super high-spec product that is measures uranium and thorium in parts per billion. This level of purity is critical in the semiconductor sector because both chemicals emit radiation which affect the chips’ performance and can cause false calculations in artificial-intelligence systems.
Alpha HPA’s customers are in the next generation cutting-edge technology fields, Williamson says, including advanced semiconductor supply chains for artificial intelligence, advanced ceramics companies, biotech, biomedical companies, and lithium-ion battery technology companies. They all need ultra high-purity aluminium materials, and they are impatient for Alpha HPA’s stage two facility to begin producing.
“Each of those customers has a very specific focus not only in terms of the purity, but also the physical characteristics of how the particle itself performs,” Williamson says. “The artificial intelligence semiconductors are at the bleeding edge of science, with super-fast processors that are the most advanced technologies in the semiconductor world.”
Alpha HPA’s two main competitors, both in Japan, simply don’t have the ability to produce the high-purity levels of aluminium materials now achieved by the Australian company, and increasingly in demand as artificial intelligence use expands into every field of human endeavour. “The use of high-purity alumina in AI semiconductors is a more recent phenomenon that has been driven by the relentless pursuit of compute capability from AI processors or GPUs, as they’re called,” Williamson says.
Semiconductors have continued to miniaturise and carry more transistors per square millimetre to provide ever-increasing computing power, but this has natural limits. Along with miniaturisation, semiconductor output can be boosted by replacing silica with high-purity aluminium products to improve thermal transfer and keep the whole package cooler, increasing the number of calculations possible per second.
Alpha HPA’s work has elicited a great deal of interest. Letters of intent from clients already sourcing limited amounts of high-purity aluminium products from the stage one facility now cover more than 13,500 tonnes of annual product demand from the stage two facility, exceeding planned production.
“As we approach the start-up of stage two, we’re putting a bit of pressure on customers to start locking in binding agreements because we are oversubscribed in terms of letters of intent,” Williamson says.
The company’s high-purity aluminium materials originate from bauxite, mined in Weipa in far north Queensland. The bauxite is then refined at a nearby alumina refinery in Gladstone. Alpha HPA sources alumina hydrate feedstock from the facility before the product is put through the high-energy step of calcination, and before it is sent to a smelter to be turned into aluminium metal.
The feedstock Alpha HPA buys for about $US400 a tonne is already 99.9 per cent pure, and Alpha HPA then purifies it much further for use in advanced technologies. The refined Alpha HPA product is finally sold for $US30,000 per tonne on average.
Product development is ongoing, and Alpha HPA scientists have recently taken big steps into the future, with an advance that could make artificial-intelligence chips faster and more powerful.
“We’ve cracked the nut on producing a transparent alumina, which we think may have an application in the semiconductor space for what’s called interposers,” Williamson says. “They are a special component that sits in the advanced AI package that separates the main GPU logic chip and the higher bandwidth memory chips from the substrate, but gives a connection through to it, so it can all connect into the main board.”
As well as making the leap into the future of artificial intelligence, the Alpha HPA products are energy-efficient. “Our process is very efficient thanks to the solvent extraction technology,” Williamson says. “It’s mostly gravity, there are not many moving parts, just pumps and mixes.”
All these elements add up to a desirable product for ultra hi-tech companies both in Australia and overseas. “We’ve actually got some pretty good brand recognition in Japan and Korea at the moment,” Williamson says. “We have people seeking us out for materials, and that says a lot about our capability.”