In short: A "massive structural change," not the usual cycle: too few deposits, new ones deep underground, and "at the highest price you've ever seen in copper… they're expecting total production to go down" — proof price alone can't pull supply. Demand is layered: electrification (90% of use), EVs and grids, then AI data centers, and nations scrambling to secure supply chains. "It could run a decade."
Copper carries electricity, so every power line, electric car, and data center needs a lot of it. Harris's point is that mines are getting older and lower-grade, and new discoveries are deep and slow to build, so supply is actually expected to fall this year even though prices are at records. When a higher price can't bring on more supply, he argues, prices have further to go, and the countries that need copper most are now racing to lock it up.
6:36In the past we just took big mines and we said, ah, let's just make them a little bit bigger. The grade goes down, and we were squeezing the blood out of a turnip. So copper has several problems. A, there's not enough deposits. And the deposits that have been discovered recently are very deep underground.
In short: Structural deficit: echoing Friedland, the world needs a 10 Mt-contained copper discovery "every year for the next 25 years"; the Domes region went 22 years without one. Data centers, EVs and electrification drive demand, and ~60% of AI capex goes to raw materials (a Jeff Currie stat, cited by the host). The market is "finally meeting reality."
Copper carries electricity, so data centers, electric cars and power grids all need much more of it. The problem is supply: new big deposits are rare, and most remaining ones in South America are deep underground and slow and expensive to develop. Citing mining financier Robert Friedland, O’Brien says the world would need to find a giant deposit every year for 25 years to close the gap. That shortage is why he expects prices to stay strong and why near-surface deposits in Zambia are drawing so much attention.
1:56speak and I'm pretty sure the number he used was that we needed a 10 million ton copper deposit. Okay, that would be big. That's like Barrick's Lumwana mine, which is next door to us. That's 8.5 million tons of contained copper. Okay, — you need one of those found every year for the next 25 years to affect that deficit.
In short: "Higher prices for longer and we haven't really got to the crunch yet." Physical tightness shows in TC/RCs going from +$90/t to −$150/t (smelters paying miners); cyclical under-investment, short-term outages (Grasberg, Hormuz sulfur) and structural demand (electrification, AI power). His 2018 report "The Cupboard Is Nearly Bare" foresaw a 2030s deficit; new mines take 15–20 years.
Miners normally pay smelters a fee to turn their concentrate into metal. Today some smelters are paying miners instead, because there isn't enough concentrate to go around — a sign the physical market is very tight. Cryer's case is that years of too little investment, temporary outages at big mines, and fast-growing demand from electric vehicles, power grids and AI data centers all hit at once, while a new mine takes 15–20 years to build. He expects higher prices to last.
1:17of three things. At the moment, I think it's a cyclical change. It's some short-term issues which won't be here forever by their very nature. And there's some structural issues. Obviously, you can see it's a supply side issue, just the price of spot metal, but you can also see that in the TC/RCs, the treatment charges that smelters are charging miners for access to material.
In short: "Copper is my next favorite thing": a supply shock (30 years of underinvestment, Escondida output down, global output fell even at ~$6.50/lb) colliding with a demand shock (AI data centers, military spending, a $5T US grid rebuild to 2050). Rio Tinto's chairman told him they have "no idea where this copper supply is going to come from."
Copper is the wiring of the modern economy: power grids, data centers and weapons all need a lot of it. Giustra's case is that demand is jumping (AI, military rebuilding in Europe and the US, and an old US power grid that needs replacing) at the same moment supply is shrinking, because miners barely built new mines for 30 years and the old ones are running out of rich ore.
A new copper mine takes many years to build, so supply can't respond quickly. When more buyers chase metal that can't be produced fast enough, the price has to rise — which is why he expects big mining companies to buy smaller ones that own the few large, high-quality deposits left.
24:11And it's very simple. We have a supply deficit shock coming together at the same time there's a demand shock for copper. So where's the supply shock coming from? You've got basically that we've underinvested for the last 30 years. There are no new mines, we just haven't invested.
In short: Hitting all-time highs "just like the term price for uranium," yet still much lower than previous cycle highs on an inflation-adjusted basis — deficits forming from weather/geological mine disruptions against electrification and electricity-growth demand. Copper equities "have done really really well this year"; renewed flows into Sprott's copper products.
Copper carries electricity — every grid upgrade, power plant, EV and data center needs it. It is at record prices, but Ciampaglia's point is that after adjusting for decades of inflation it is still far below its previous cycle peaks, so "record high" does not mean expensive.
Supply keeps getting disrupted (weather and geological problems at mines) just as the world electrifies, so shortfalls could form. That is why he sees upside momentum and why investors are coming back to copper products and copper mining shares.
10:44But 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.
In short: "An accident waiting to happen": managed money net long 20–30% of open interest, ~70% of major-exchange inventories (~700k t) in CME/LME warehouses, 2–3× the S&P's volatility, and a record ~0.62 100-day correlation with the S&P (since 1988). Down 5% on the day; "copper breaking down usually coincides with the stock market breaking down."
Everyone knows the long-term copper story — AI data centers, electrification, the energy transition. McGlone says the danger is inside the market itself. Tariffs pulled most of the world's exchange-held copper (about 70%) into US and London warehouses, distorting prices, and speculative funds are heavily bet on higher prices — net long 20–30% of all open futures contracts.
When that many traders sit on the same side, a small shock can send them all rushing for the exit. Copper is also moving in lockstep with the stock market (a record correlation of ~0.62) and, like the S&P, is ~40% above its 200-week average. That is why he calls it "an accident waiting to happen" — and when copper breaks, stocks usually break too.
15:39They've been running 20 to 30% of total open interest net long. They're way long. And if you look at copper over the last three, four years, it trades at two to three times the volatility of the S&P 500 and it's underperformed. Now, this year it's performed. That's an accident waiting to happen. It's stuck in the middle of tariffs.
In short: The first supply chain he'd secure for Ottawa or Washington: "that is where we see the biggest supply deficits over the next 5 to 10 years"; "everyone's freaking out about" it, which is why the price is "starting to really go through the roof." The US grid needs $700B–$1.4T and "what is the grid? Copper and steel."
Asked what a government should lock up first, Giustra picks copper, because forecasters expect the biggest shortfalls over the next decade. Power grids, data centers and weapons all need it, and new mines take many years, so shortages push the price up.
21:30And that's consistent, by the way, with Plan Nord, which has been a platform of the Quebec government for almost two decades. — Frank, if you were advising the government, either Ottawa or Washington, which mineral supply chains would you secure first? — [Giustra] Well, certainly all of the critical minerals. Copper, for sure. That is where we see the biggest supply deficits over the next 5 to 10 years, as being projected by almost everybody including the major mining companies. There are going to be huge
In short: The month's dominant theme — four of August's issues are copper. The flagship analysis, "The World Is Hoarding Copper at Rapid Pace," "details how governments are moving to ringfence copper inside their borders, just as the market tips into its deepest deficit in more than 20 years." Alongside it: the Founders+ monthly issue on "The Copper Developer Located Where the Majors Love" — returning to the same jurisdiction as a July-2025 silver play that "has appreciated by as much as 240%," this time "for copper and a strategic developer" — a "Key Founders+ Portfolio Update" on that copper recommendation, a completed spin-out ("The Founders+ Catalyst We Flagged Just Happened") affecting shares added from the August monthly issue, and an exclusive Founders+ conversation with "a leading, successful copper exploration executive" headlined "The Biggest Opportunities Are Ahead." No ticker is disclosed in the digest.
Copper took up four of August's issues, which tells you where the house's conviction sits. The argument in the flagship piece is a change in who is competing for the metal: not just manufacturers, but governments, which are "moving to ringfence copper inside their borders" — keeping domestically-mined copper at home through export restrictions, strategic reserves and tariffs.
That matters because it happens on top of a market she says is tipping into "its deepest deficit in more than 20 years." A shortage is one thing; a shortage in which some of the supply is politically removed from the open market is worse, because the metal available to everyone else shrinks faster than the headline production number suggests. The picks themselves — a "strategic developer" in a jurisdiction majors like, and a spin-out that has now completed — sit behind the Founders+ paywall and are not named here.
In short: Record prices "are sustainable": adjusted for the dollar's lost spending power they are not a true all-time high, "there's room to grow." A page-one story since his 2016 book (copper was $2/lb), though developer 10-baggers are gone.
Copper is at record prices, but because the dollar buys less than it used to, he says the price isn't really a record in "real" terms and can keep rising as electrification (EVs, solar, grids, batteries) grows. The cheap, early-stage copper stocks have mostly already risen, so he prefers ones that haven't moved.
9:05So, we're looking now at copper at all-time highs. How much spending power has been lost in the US dollar? So everything, inflation, we've seen it everywhere from Big Macs to copper to everything you buy, it's not really all-time highs. If we look at an inflation-adjusted all-time high in copper, when you factor in the loss of spending power in the US dollar, there's room to grow still in my opinion.
In short: Doing renewables at national scale means "you have to have an awful lot more copper… because you're going to have to have multiple levels of the transmission system"; commodities generally are "a good place to be absolutely" in a zero-sum neo-mercantilist rearming world — but they "need to be tied to something": "copper is to build out the energy grid, not to sit in a warehouse."
Copper is the metal electricity travels through, so anything that means "more wires" means more copper. Every's argument isn't a price forecast — it's a physical-accounting one. If a country tries to run itself on renewables at national scale, the power arrives in bursts rather than steadily, so the grid needs several extra layers of transmission to move surges around and cover the gaps. Those extra layers are made of copper. Add the data-center buildout that is already straining local power bills, and the electricity system needs rebuilding in a way nobody has budgeted the raw material for.
He puts it inside his broader view that in a "zero-sum, neo-mercantilist, rearming world" — where governments deliberately disrupt each other's supply chains — commodities generally are "a good place to be absolutely." The important caveat is his condition: commodities have to be tied to actual use. In a world of economic statecraft, governments will not tolerate stockpiling metal purely to speculate on the price or to use it as collateral for financial games; they want it consumed by something real. As the host put it and Every agreed: copper is to build out the energy grid, not to sit in a warehouse.
56:44conversation with you and there's a hybrid car on my drive. — if you're going to do it purely through that on a national level, then you have to have an awful lot more copper. an awful lot more copper because you're going to have to have multiple levels of the transmission system to allow for periods where you have a surge relative to the base.
In short: "I like them. I like silver. I like copper. Copper quietly is what, like almost seven bucks? Everyone was talking about it, no one's talking about it anymore." The reason is the grid: "you cannot build a grid with dollar swap lines" — a self-sufficiency build-out has to be paid for in physical metal, not financial engineering.
This is copper the physical metal, not a mining company. Asked what he thinks of metals other than gold, he answers plainly: "I like them. I like silver. I like copper" — noting that copper has quietly gone to roughly seven dollars a pound while nobody talks about it any more, which is often when a market is most interesting.
The thesis is the electrical grid. American electricity generation did not increase at all between 2004 and 2024, while China's grid went from less than half the size of America's to more than twice it. Reversing that — plus AI data centres and rebuilding a defense industrial base — takes enormous quantities of copper, steel and iron ore. His line is the memorable one: "you cannot build a grid with dollar swap lines." Financial engineering can move money around; it cannot conjure metal. So if the US has genuinely chosen self-sufficiency over financial dominance, the physical inputs get bid.
1:18:20I like — copper quietly is what, like almost seven bucks? Everyone was talking about it, no one's talking about it anymore. I think iron ore, steel, all these — you cannot build a grid with dollar swap lines. You can't. And at some point the United States has to sort of figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. Do we want to be the bank for the Chinese and the world or do we want to actually grow our grid and be a nation that can actually make stuff.
In short: Structural scarcity that money cannot fix. Against the host's figure that the world needs 50 mega copper mines in 20 years and the deposits don't exist: "the dollar has hyperinflated against the major copper mines number five through number 50 that we need. There is no amount of dollars that can get you them because they don't exist." The AI/reshoring build-out is the constraint "you're ultimately going to hit."
This is copper the physical metal, not a company. The argument runs through the mines rather than the price. Data centres, electrification and rebuilding a defense industrial base all need enormous amounts of copper — on the host's numbers, something like fifty giant new mines over twenty years. The problem is that fifty deposits of that size have not even been found, let alone permitted, financed and built, and building just one takes a thousand people on site for a year and a half.
Gromen's contribution is to translate that into monetary language: "the dollar has hyperinflated against the major copper mines number five through number 50 that we need. There is no amount of dollars that can get you them, because they don't exist." When something physically cannot be bought at any price, its currency price has in effect already collapsed — you just can't see it on a chart yet. That is why he treats the AI and reshoring build-out as something that must hit a hard physical constraint, and why the constraint itself is the investable fact.
45:06It's ephemeral. It's nothing. The dollar can't buy you them. The dollar has hyperinflated against the major copper mines number five through number 50 that we need. There is no amount of dollars that can get you them because they don't exist. And the Chinese apparently someone understood that while the Americans were chasing dudes and flip-flops around Afghanistan and Iraq.
In short: A new record high — COMEX ~$6.66/lb, LME ~$14,100/t — "fast approaching our 2026 forecast of $7 per pound," with a structural shortage from falling ore grades and limited mine output, a Morgan Stanley 600kt 2026 refined deficit (widest in 20+ years), and LME available stocks down to ~94,200t, "little more than a day of global consumption." Governments ringfencing supply (DRC export ban, China's strategic-mineral reserve and acid ban, the U.S. 50% tariff and DPA export-block power) "will continue to provide tailwinds to copper prices."
Copper is the wire in everything — power grids, EVs, data centers, weapons — and nothing else conducts electricity well enough to replace it at scale. The world is going to need a lot more of it, and the mines cannot deliver: the ore coming out of the ground keeps getting weaker (Chile now digs far more rock for the same copper), and no meaningful new supply arrives quickly. Morgan Stanley expects the refined market to come up 600,000 tonnes short in 2026 — the biggest shortfall in more than twenty years.
What is new in this post is not the shortage but who is now hoarding against it. Three of the biggest players in the copper chain each moved to keep their share inside their own borders. The DRC — the world's number-two producer — banned exports of unprocessed copper (and cobalt) concentrate, copying what Indonesia did with nickel: if you want our metal, refine it here and leave the profit behind. China, which refines almost half the world's copper, formally declared copper a "strategic mineral" and gave the state the right to lock reserves away from the market for five years at a stretch — and separately stopped exporting sulphuric acid, the chemical used to make roughly a fifth of the world's refined copper (Chile buys over a million tonnes of it from China every year). The United States put a 50% tariff on imported semi-finished copper, which has sucked metal across the ocean — over 200,000 tonnes landed in U.S. ports in July, the fastest pace in twelve years — and armed the Commerce Department with wartime-era powers to stop copper and copper scrap from leaving the country at all.
The effect of all that is visible in one number: copper freely available in London warehouses has collapsed to about 94,200 tonnes — roughly one day of world consumption — down from ~400,000 tonnes in April. Traders like Trafigura are accelerating it, physically shipping metal out of London to capture the U.S. tariff premium. So the metal is not just scarce; it is scarce in the wrong places, and each government action makes the open market thinner.
Prins' stance is straightforwardly bullish: copper just made a new record (~$6.66/lb on COMEX, ~$14,100/t in London) and is closing on her $7/lb 2026 target, and she expects resource nationalism to keep "providing tailwinds to copper prices." Her longer-horizon point is the one that matters for stock selection: S&P Global sees demand rising ~50% to 42 million tonnes by 2040 while mine output peaks around 33 million tonnes in 2030 — a gap that can only be closed by building new mines, and only in places where foreign capital is welcome and the metal is allowed to be exported. That jurisdictional filter is the screen behind her next (paywalled) recommendation: a copper developer on one of the largest undeveloped deposits in a country that permits both.
In short: "We've owned copper and still do, in the form of a couple of companies… a lot of copper, a lot of gold, and silver… we own iron, we own tungsten" plus antimony — held "for quite some time," not a new trade. The macro reason: the US is "behind the eight ball" on critical minerals versus China and Russia in a multipolar world "when everybody is hoarding their own stuff."
Copper is the metal that carries electricity, so it sits behind every data centre, grid upgrade and electrified building. Oakley owns it "in the form of a couple of companies" he doesn't name, along with iron, tungsten and antimony — and he stresses these are long-standing holdings, not a new data-centre trade: "it's not something new to us really. It just so happened that it's playing probably stronger than it would have normally."
The strategic argument is a national one. The US is "behind the eight ball" on nearly every critical mineral, while China and Russia hold much of the supply, and the world is fragmenting into blocs "when everybody is hoarding their own stuff." Owning the metals is how he expresses that without having to pick which AI company wins. (He owns comparatively little aluminium.)
26:14— Yeah, no. Yeah, for sure. And I will tell you we've owned that group for a long time. In other words, we've owned copper and still do, in the form of a couple of companies. Not quite as much aluminum, but a lot of copper, a lot of gold, a lot of and silver even in a lot of those cases.
In short: No reflation signal — the copper/gold ratio sits basically at its pandemic-lockdown level near the record low; copper's strength is "largely out of supply factors more than demand."
Copper is nicknamed "Dr. Copper" because, being in everything from wiring to construction, its price is a good thermometer for the world economy. Snider's favorite version of the test is the copper-to-gold ratio: copper rising faster than gold means real economic heat (reflation); copper lagging gold means the opposite. Right now, even with gold down hard, the ratio sits roughly where it was during the COVID lockdowns of March–April 2020 — barely off its record low. That is the opposite of what you'd see if AI were truly igniting a global industrial boom.
Copper's price itself has held up, but he attributes that mostly to supply problems, not booming demand. So copper is neither a buy case nor a sell case here — it's a witness, and its testimony is that the reflation/super-cycle story is not real, which supports his whole dollar-shortage reading of the metals crash.
34:04In fact, the current copper to gold ratio is basically where it had been at the bottom of the pandemic lockdowns in March and April of 2020. That's not reflationary. Now maybe copper to gold continues to go a lot higher though given everything we just went over and a whole bunch more including the tips market and yield curves, the chances are not very good.
In short: Trading ~$6.42/lb, just off a record ~$6.70, despite "oversupply" headlines — the surplus is a tariff/inventory distortion (50% U.S. duty on semi-finished copper since August; refined exempt; Chinese refined imports –40%), masking the real supply squeeze.
In short: A top-five Prinsights 2026 commodity — ~$6/lb COMEX, $13,000+/tonne LME (near record); the April 2 tariff proclamation amplified the structural long-term view despite a reported 616kt "surplus."
Copper is one of Prins's top long-term commodity bets, driven less by the economic cycle and more by U.S. policy and which country controls supply. Prices are near record highs even though some forecasters report a surplus — because, she argues, that surplus number ignores the new tariff wall, the broken ore-processing market, and a sulfuric-acid shortage that all make real copper tighter than the headline suggests.
In short: Trading ~$6/lb on COMEX (+24% y/y, near all-time high) — the price disagrees with the ICSG's surplus call; Prins is in the "any surplus is temporary, structural demand intact" camp.
The official body that the copper industry relies on for forecasts (the ICSG) just changed its mind and said the world will have slightly more copper than it needs in 2026. Prins's point: the actual price of copper is sitting near an all-time high, which is the opposite of what you'd expect if there were a glut. When the forecast and the price disagree this sharply, she trusts the price — and lays out four reasons the forecast is wrong.
In short: Entering a new regime as a strategic asset — demand locked in (grids/EVs/renewables/AI), IEA sees a material deficit by the mid-2030s; briefly topped $14,500/t intraday in January 2026 (after first passing $12,000 in Dec 2025). Now a jurisdictional trade — neutral, stable jurisdictions command premiums.
Copper is the metal that wires everything electric — power grids, EVs, solar, and the data centers behind AI. The guest writer argues demand is basically guaranteed to keep climbing, while new supply can't keep up: building a copper mine takes 15-20 years, the best ore is getting harder to find, and the war pushed up energy costs (mining copper burns a lot of diesel and power).
The twist is geography. Most copper comes from just a few countries (Chile, Congo, Peru), and China does nearly half the world's refining — so whoever controls processing controls usable supply. Because politics can shut a project down overnight, copper has become a "jurisdictional trade": miners in stable, friendly countries are worth more than those exposed to political risk. Prins's own specific copper pick is behind the paywall.
In short: The "Copper Decade" cornerstone of AI/energy-transition demand; the new bill brings copper into parity across federal lists, easing permitting for new projects.
In short: Scores on demand durability — copper demand is tied to long-term infrastructure (transmission, substations, data-center connections, grid upgrades) that proceeds once financing/permits clear, making demand strategically necessary rather than optional.
In short: Closed >$12,000/ton on the LME for the first time (Dec 23, 2025); Wood Mackenzie sees a 250-300kt annual deficit from 2026 over the following decade — an opportunity in junior miners in neutral jurisdictions.
Copper is the wiring of electrification — power grids, transmission lines, EVs and AI data centers all need huge amounts. It just hit a record over $12,000 a ton. Meanwhile the biggest mines (in Chile and Peru) are getting less metal out of each ton of rock, and new mines take years to approve and build. Forecasters expect the world to come up 250,000-300,000 tons short every year starting in 2026. Prins sees that growing gap as an opportunity, especially in smaller "junior" miners operating in politically safe countries.
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