New Zine: Raw Materials for AI
We are pleased to launch a new publication: Raw Materials for AI is a visual and introductory zine produced by the AI + Planetary Justice Alliance as part of our project Below the Algorithm. The zine explores the physical foundations of artificial intelligence by outlining key minerals and metals essential to the production of AI systems, from semiconductors and batteries to data center infrastructure.
The publication introduces the main materials that commonly underpin the AI supply chain, including copper, silicon, gold and silver, rare earth elements, tantalum, cobalt, lithium, and gallium. For each, it provides a brief description of their industrial use in AI hardware. The zine emphasizes that these materials are not abstract components, but physical substances that are necessary for specific components of the materialities that make up artificial intelligence.
Rather than offering an exhaustive or technical account, this zine serves as a grounding tool: indeed, we hoped to produce a visual, accessible starting point to begin unpacking the material reality of AI. It is meant to help readers move from thinking about AI as a purely digital, cloud-based technology to understanding it as something rooted in physical elements. Although the zine’s title characterizes the materials as “Raw”, it is important to note that, before these are ready to be used to manufacture AI hardware, they need to undergo complex chemical processes of refinement. Read more at our Materials Manufacturing page.
From here, as part of our “Below the Algorithm” project, we will dive more deeply into the planetary justice impacts of mining for these minerals. Extracting and processing them often comes with severe social and ecological impacts, and their supply chains are complex, opaque, and deeply interconnected. Our goal is to keep tracing these connections – between chips and mines, between servers and soils – so that conversations about AI also reckon with the worlds it rests on.
