Five years ago, a single Sandvik drill rig ran unsupervised for the first time at Vale's Sossego copper complex in Brazil's Pará state. It was an experiment. Nobody expected it to become policy.
It has. Vale Base Metals has now ordered sixteen autonomous drill rigs from Sandvik for its Sossego and Salobo operations, with deliveries running from late 2025 through 2029, according to Mining.com and International Mining. The order pairs nine DR416i rotary blasthole drills with seven DI650i down-the-hole rigs, and marks the moment Vale's autonomous drilling program stopped being a pilot and became a production strategy across two of the largest copper operations in Latin America.
That shift matters beyond Brazil. Sossego was Vale's first copper mine, opened in 2004, while Salobo holds the largest copper mineral reserve in Brazil, the miner says. Both sit hundreds of kilometers into Pará's interior, far from the labor pools that conventional drilling crews require. Automating the rigs doesn't just cut headcount — it solves a staffing problem that has bedeviled remote South American mining for years, while feeding a copper market that is scrambling to add supply.
From trial to fleet
The Sandvik partnership began quietly. Our journey with Vale Base Metals began in 2021 with the initial DR416i trial at the Sossego mine, Sandvik's mining president Mats Eriksson said, describing the arc from single-rig test to multi-year fleet contract. The orders were mostly booked in the second and third quarters of 2025, with the remainder in 2026 — a sign the decision to scale predates the copper price surge that has since made every ounce of automated efficiency more valuable. Eriksson called the deal a chance to "grow our surface partnership with Vale Base Metals" and "a significant milestone" demonstrating Sandvik's ability to deliver surface automation across its full product line.
The delivery schedule tells its own story about how cautiously even a five-year-proven system gets rolled out. Shipments of the Sandvik DR416i model began in the fourth quarter of 2025 and are set to continue through the second quarter of 2027, while of the DI650i units, four are planned for delivery in 2026 and the remaining three are expected to arrive on site in 2029. That three-year tail on a handful of rigs suggests Vale is deliberately spacing out the hardest integration work — likely the down-the-hole units doing precision pre-split drilling — rather than betting the whole program on one delivery window.
Vale isn't alone in stretching autonomy beyond the pit. In Australia, contract miner Byrnecut placed a June order with Sandvik for twenty underground machines, including four AutoMine-equipped Toro LH621i loaders that run driverless tramming cycles using laser-based environmental mapping, inertial navigation, and proximity sensing, allowing the loader to operate continuously through shift changes under remote operator supervision. Barrick's Nevada Gold Mines has its own Autonomous Haulage Program underway at Cortez, described in a recent SEC filing as a strategic initiative to improve safety, productivity, and operating consistency, with a phased deployment starting at Cortez and expanding to other operations as fleet capacity grows.
The harder problem: raise boring
If surface drilling automation is maturing, underground raise boring is still catching up — and South Africa's Master Drilling wants to close that gap fast. The company, which posted record 2025 revenue of $292 million and a near-billion-dollar order book, told investors in March that it aims "to commission a total autonomous drilling system, and we hope to get that over the line before the end of the year," chief executive Danie Pretorius said, as reported by Mining Weekly. Raise boring — drilling vertical shafts between underground levels — accounts for more than four-fifths of Master Drilling's business, and automating it removes people from one of mining's more claustrophobic and dangerous tasks. Analysts tracking the rollout note the commissioning timeline has since crept to late 2026 to early 2027, a reminder that autonomy at depth is a harder engineering problem than autonomy on an open pit bench.
The pattern across these programs is consistent: operators don't leap straight to full autonomy. They spend years validating a single rig at a single site, then order fleets once the economics prove out. Vale's five-year runway from trial to sixteen-rig commitment is the template; Byrnecut's staged 2026-2028 delivery and Master Drilling's slipping commissioning date show the same caution playing out elsewhere.
None of this happens in a vacuum. Copper miners' shares have wobbled alongside broader energy markets — the Global X Copper Miners ETF closed at $84.19 Wednesday, down -0.47%, according to market data — even as the metal remains central to the electrification wave the IEA says is driving global energy investment. Automated drilling won't move that price by itself. But at Sossego and Salobo, where rigs will run day and night without shift changes for the rest of the decade, it is quietly reshaping how much copper Brazil can actually get out of the ground — and how few people it takes to do it.
