Title: Sprott's John Ciampaglia on Uranium and SPUT Show: Jimmy Connor (YouTube) — interviewer Jimmy Connor; recorded in London during WNA Symposium week Guest: John Ciampaglia — CEO, Sprott Asset Management (Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, SPUT) Date: 2026-09-10 URL: https://youtu.be/-vCcOxT3nBE Length: 16:08 Note: Auto-captions; fillers (um/uh/you know/stutters) removed and caption garbles corrected ("spat/spatu/sput" = Sprott / SPUT; "SPRA/Sprat" = Sprott; "U308" = U3O8; "best" = Bessent; "Open AAI" = OpenAI; "nent" = nascent; "accreatively" = accretively; "resourceri" = resource-rich); wording otherwise verbatim. "potentially tech coming public" at 04:09 is an unresolved caption garble (a second nuclear IPO candidate) and is left as captioned. The Finnish utility in the Google deal is not named.
00:09 John, thank you very much for joining us today. So, you and your team are in London meeting with investors from all across the globe. Always interested in hearing your thoughts on what they're saying, especially given now with so much happening in the world. We still have hostilities in the Middle East. Oil's up 50 to 60% on the year.
00:26 That's leading to higher inflation expectations. We have bond yields going up across the globe. What are you hearing from investors? >> Yeah, well, thanks for having me back. It's good to be back in London. I'd say first of all, we've seen this conference change a lot in the last few years.
00:42 When we first came a few years ago, there was only a few specialty hedge fund managers that were interested in uranium and nuclear energy that were in attendance. And this week, we've had a number of very well-attended events being hosted by various banks all week that we've been going to and I think that's a really good signal that investor interest is there.
01:04 They're interested in this topic. They come to London to learn more and to follow the market. It is a market that's very different than other commodities. It's somewhat opaque. And there's definitely a thirst for knowledge and interest. As you mentioned, it's been an odd year. Last year was a really interesting year in the markets with a lot of distractions.
01:24 I thought this year was going to be a little bit calmer. Unfortunately that's not the case but we have had distractions with the war in Iran. Obviously US interest rates and debt levels are another big distraction for a lot of market participants. I think that has clearly put some shareholders and investors on the sidelines waiting for more clarity.
01:48 The volatility has been very extreme. But with respect to uranium and nuclear, I think most people are kind of looking past all that short-term noise. They're looking at the fundamentals. They're looking at the capital coming into the space. They're looking at the policy announcements and the fundamentals just look better and better as the structural supply deficit continues to be the underpinning of the story.
02:10 But obviously, we're seeing tremendous new sources of demand for uranium in the coming years. One of the new sources is from AI and I want to get your thoughts on this whole AI narrative because this whole ecosystem is really based on two companies, OpenAI and also Anthropic. They're going to go public sometime this year and there's all sorts of speculation out there on how these IPOs will go.
02:36 And I want to get your thoughts on this. If those IPOs don't go well and that whole AI theme collapses, what does that do for the uranium price of anything? Yeah, obviously in the last couple years there's been a direct connection between nuclear energy and the hyperscalers and for good reason.
02:54 The hyperscalers a few years ago were very focused on renewable energy as a primary source of providing clean power for their data centers. There's obviously limitations with that in terms of having intermittent variable power and a couple years ago they realized that nuclear energy had to be part of their energy mix.
03:15 So why that's important is they bring really much needed capital to the space particularly for more nascent technologies, smaller scale reactors which they're funding. They're also signing very long-term high value power purchase agreements for electricity. We're seeing it in the United States. We just saw an announcement with Google and the Finnish utility.
03:39 And so high electricity prices I think give utilities the confidence to invest back in their business. And if you're a utility over the last two decades, you haven't really seen a lot of load growth. So you haven't really made big capital investments. Yes, you've changed the mix of energy sources, but in terms of making net new additional investment to provide more electricity, yes to hyperscalers, but obviously there's a lot of reshoring going on right now, which is obviously electricity intensive. High electricity prices, I
04:09 think, is part of the reason why interest in nuclear is coming back. The need for base load power is obviously paramount for running AI data centers. Yes, there's going to be a lot of competition for capital with some of these new IPOs. There's also IPOs coming in the nuclear space. We've obviously heard about Westinghouse coming public, potentially tech coming public.
04:32 I think that's all net positive because one of the main messages we've had with investors in the last five years is it's hard for them to get positioned in the sector because the market is still in a period of recapitalizing itself after a very difficult period from 2011 to 2020. So investor capital's coming back. There's more choices for investors to play this thematic and I think that's why we're seeing all this interest right now.
04:58 So let's look at the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust or SPUT. Take us through the year. Q1 was very busy, very active. It's been quiet since. >> Yeah, it's been interesting. We kind of think about the market for the uranium trust post Donald Trump's winning election because it's had an incredible influence obviously on energy policy and other world events and it has had an impact on our ability to raise capital and there was a period there in early 2025 when the
05:32 start of the tariff tantrum had happened where investors were just not sure what to do. It was a very quiet period for us and then investors kind of looked at the opportunity, they looked past the noise and they saw a very attractive uranium price and I can tell you that over the last five quarters we have raised more capital in the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust than at any point in its 5-year history and that to me says a lot about the direction of travel for uranium prices, investors' view on the sector and we've been
06:06 very active. Last year we bought just under 9 million pounds of uranium. In the first quarter I believe we bought about 6 million which was very fast deployment for us. We've since bought another about a million pounds. So we're at about 7 million pounds so far in 2026. And it feels like we're going to get back to another spurt of capital raising as more positive news flow and we get out of that seasonal kind of doldrums.
06:37 Taking a step back over the last five years, we started this vehicle in July of 2021 with about 18 million pounds of U3O8 on our balance sheet. We're now sitting at I think just under 82 million. So we have been very busy over the last 5 years buying uranium at very attractive prices and even at $90 spot price we still think the price is very attractive to investors and that's why I think we've raised so much capital in the last year and a bit >> and your annual limit is 9 million pounds as you mentioned you already
07:09 acquired 7 million do you think you will hit that 9 million limit by the end of the year >> yeah we would absolutely love to fill our capacity and if we do achieve that, we obviously have the ability to do some other things to ensure we're able to continue to raise equity accretively in the vehicle.
07:31 As we've seen, I've been asked a few times what will the catalyst be to get the market going again and in our experience it's very hard to predict what those catalysts are. The last few years have been catalyst rich in terms of news flow and whatnot. Just a few days ago we saw the US government put out an RFP, they need to buy uranium so you're starting to see a lot of new sources of demand, obviously SMR technology is starting to get to testing criticality, obviously commercial approvals and
08:06 hopefully deployment and so a lot of the demand models have very little anticipated demand for uranium built in thus far. I think over the next 12 to 24 months as these projects move forward people are going to start to recognize that yes there's a lot of incremental demand coming and then obviously China, they are really the leader here, they are building around eight new reactors per year, it's mindboggling, they continue to acquire large amounts of uranium. India just announced two very large transactions to stock up
08:41 for their program which is very ambitious and we obviously have western utilities that are watching all of this and what we're hearing is a lot of them are getting kind of back into the market with RFPs because they obviously need to replenish their inventory levels as well. >> 2026 has been relatively quiet in both the spot and the term market.
09:01 The price is up 10% on the year. Oil is up 50 to 60% on the year depending on what day of the week. But do you think investors are more focused on oil now as opposed to uranium? Is that where a lot of investment dollars are going? Yeah, we don't see the big dollars going into those categories because it's been very hard to trade those sectors.
09:24 The on and off again news flow with we have peace deals, we don't have a peace deal. It's I think made it very difficult to trade those markets. We think it's just basically we've been risk off. People have taken bets off the table. It's very arbitrary in terms of news flow and headline around why something is up 5% down 5% day-to-day.
09:44 That is typically not a trading environment that most long only investors want to participate in. So I think people are looking for value right now. We have seen some rotation from sectors that perform better. We're starting to see some rotation of dollars back into uranium equities in the last couple of weeks because they did correct in the second quarter.
10:08 So I think that's a good sign that people are feeling a little better about relative valuations. And so we think the balance of the year is going to be a lot more constructive irrespective of this saga that we're seeing in the Iranian conflict. >> And Sprott offers many other products for investors which focus on resources.
10:26 One of which is copper. Copper is making new highs every other day. >> Are you seeing many flows into those products? >> Yeah, we're starting to see renewed interest in copper for sure. Copper is a really interesting metal in that it's hitting all-time highs, just like the term price for uranium is.
10:44 But it's still, on an inflation adjusted basis much much lower than previous cycle highs. And I think that's why the interest is there. I think that's why the momentum to the upside is there for both uranium and copper. People are seeing the deficits that could be forming in copper as we're seeing more and more mine disruptions due to weather or geological events.
11:11 And there's obviously a growing need for copper as the world electrifies, base load power and overall electricity growth is back on the rise. And so copper I think is another really interesting energy metal along with uranium and the copper equities have done really really well this year against the backdrop of a lot of volatility with some other resource sectors >> and gold and silver were coming to life I believe in the month of July and then that all changed with interest rate expectations, bond yields moving up, the
11:44 US dollar moving higher. What are your flows like into the gold and silver products >> yeah we had tremendous interest in both gold and silver earlier in the year with incredibly high prices. We've subsequently had price corrections in both of those metals. Some money has come off the table for sure.
12:04 I would say more western oriented money. Money in India and China continue to accumulate whether that's individuals, institutional investors or central banks. And we are starting to see stability in the price of gold. We have seen it start to regain some momentum with that. We're starting to see western flows return which I think is very healthy.
12:26 Investors are obviously looking at the showdown going on in the US bond market between Bessent and the bond vigilantes and obviously what's going on with the yen. It's going to be very interesting to see but I think irrespective of how that plays out it continues to affirm to investors that having a hard asset, a neutral reserve asset like gold makes sense in your portfolio.
12:50 I think that's why gold has found a bottom around 4,000. It's obviously trying to rally back here. And gold remains, I think, a very interesting long-term part of your portfolio given some of these issues we're seeing in the bond market with bond yields growing, inflation pressure still there, and obviously debt levels globally remain very, very high.
13:14 John, we touched on a lot here in the last few minutes, but is there anything I didn't ask or is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience you might have an interest in with gold, silver, copper, uranium? >> Yeah. Well, I'd say the big picture here is around critical materials and critical materials can be defined in different ways, but we obviously are viewing critical materials as commodities that are very important to energy security, national security.
13:40 So whether that is uranium, copper, rare earths, different battery metals, these are all really really important. Precious metals obviously are kind of the cornerstone of your portfolio. Diversify against other risks. But commodities are coming back to life.
14:04 They have been in various stages of bull markets for the last 3 to 5 years. And we still think we're in the early stages. More and more generalist investors are rethinking their allocation to metals and mining. And obviously at Sprott, we've been involved in metals and mining for decades.
14:23 We are at the front, front and center of every cycle. And we really see investors bringing their interest back to the space after many many years. Capital pools are very large in the world. They have very little exposure to commodities. Investors are looking at the signals coming from markets and governments around energy policy and they are responding to that and I think that's why we see interest coming back.
14:51 We see risk capital coming back to the space which is important. We see governments acknowledge they need to reform everything from permitting to helping to support the mining sector. Canada is a great example right now. It's resource-rich. We have not fully taken advantage of that for the last decade and now it's become a sense of urgency and I think investors are paying very close attention to what's going on and for us this has been years in the making.
15:24 These cycles tend to last for a very long time. The last cycle was very challenging and very long and so we think this commodity cycle will be prolonged because of the lack of investment that happened in the previous 10 to 15 years. So we're very bullish. We still think we're in the very early to middle innings of this cycle and that capital is finally starting to come back into our space.
15:49 So we're very excited. >> Great insights and thank you for stopping by. >> Thanks Jimmy. Appreciate it. >> [music]