Is Copper at the Start of the Next Supercycle?

  “To maintain global 3% GDP growth, with no electrification, we’ll have to mine the same amount of copper in the next 18 years as we’ve mined in the last 10,000 years.”  - Robert Friedland 

I’ve spent decades in the mining world, financing juniors, building companies, and watching cycles come and go. I’ve lived through booms that made fortunes and busts that wiped them out overnight. 

What we’re facing with copper right now feels different than a boom—deeper, more structural, more consequential. This is more than a commodity rally driven by speculation or short-term supply hiccups. It’s the early stages of a secular bull market that could last a decade or more, as demand grows and supply struggles to keep pace. The world is waking up to a crunch that’s been building for years.

Let’s start with the demand side. For generations, demand for copper —integral to wiring, plumbing, and basic industrial needs—has grown at a modest clip, around 2% annually. That era is over. We’re now looking at sustained annual growth of 3% or higher, possibly much higher, driven by forces that barely existed twenty years ago.

First, the energy transition. Electrification is a necessity if we want to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In places like China and the European Union, electric vehicles already outsell internal-combustion-engine vehicles. EVs require several times more copper than traditional cars. 

Meanwhile, wind farms and solar installations need vast amounts of copper for turbines, panels, and the grids that tie them together. Infrastructure upgrades—charging networks, transmission lines, smart cities—add even more demand. The deteriorating US electrical grid is in a precarious state, with much of its transmission and distribution infrastructure—mostly built in the 1960s and 1970s—now well past its design life. That’s partly why we’re seeing more and more outages from extreme weather and fuel-supply issues, as well as demand surges from the data centers sprouting like mushrooms to meet the demands of AI.

According to Brattle Group analyses, upgrading the grid to enhance reliability, expand capacity, and accommodate this load growth is likely to cost between $760 billion and $1.4 trillion over the next 25 years. Other reports project up to $1.4 trillion in capital expenditures by 2030 (much of which will be passed on to consumers through higher electricity rates).

As for the data-center boom, those vast facilities are copper hogs. Power transmission, cooling systems, servers—everything requires massive wiring and many, many conductors. One modest data center can use hundreds of thousands of tons of copper over its lifetime. AI isn’t just computing; it’s an energy-intensive arms race, and copper is the central nervous system that delivers the power. 

Add in defense spending, reshoring of manufacturing, and the breakdown of efficient globalization, and you have overlapping megatrends all competing for the same metal. My old friend Robert Friedland reminds us that we’ll need to mine more copper in the next 25 years than we’ve extracted in human history to date just to sustain moderate global GDP growth around 3%. 

As in so many fields, China plays a key role here. The world’s largest consumer and refiner of copper, China is shifting priorities. Their export restrictions on copper (and other metals, such as silver) signal a move toward self-sufficiency. No more assuming endless global codependence. The result? Physical markets are tightening faster than paper prices suggest.

On the supply side, the picture is equally daunting. Decades of underinvestment have left us vulnerable. Exploration spending has been high in nominal terms, but discoveries have dried up since the 1980s. Major new mines take 15 to 20 years from find to production—if they make it at all. Permitting delays, political risks, and community opposition add years and billions to timelines. Brownfield expansions—the low-hanging fruit—are mostly picked clean.

Existing copper operations face their own problems. Many mines are over a century old, with ore grades declining steadily. Lower grades mean more energy, more water, and higher costs to extract the same amount of metal. Disruptions and ongoing issues have become routineat copper mines in places like Indonesia, Chile, the DRC, and Peru. These aren’t anomalies; they’re symptoms of an aging, overstretched system.

The numbers tell a stark tale. Production growth is crawling at less than 1 percent a year. At the same time, demand is accelerating. Analysts from ICSG, Reuters, Morgan Stanley, and others foresee deficits in refined copper ranging from 150,000 to 600,000 tons annually in the near term. Without massive new investment and recycling ramps,Bloomberg warns, cumulative gaps will reach millions of tonnes by mid-century. Inventories on exchanges like the LME look ample on paper, but for long-term industrial buyers focused on security of supply, those are irrelevant. Physical tightness is what matters.

Copper stands on the brink of a “supply cliff”—a structural, not cyclical, shift. The world needs six giant tier-one mines to come online every year through 2050 just to keep up with baseline needs, let alone the demandfrom electrification, data centers, and grids. That’s not going to happen.

Recycling helps—it adds perhaps 4 million tons annually—but it’s nowhere near enough, and much of the historical stock would require dismantling entire infrastructures to access. Without unforeseen breakthroughs, catching up to demand in the next decade is mathematically near-zero.

This isn’t temporary hype. Copper prices have already hit unprecedented levels, reflecting genuine supply fears rather than froth. Retail interest is picking up—FOMO is creeping in—but institutions drove the early moves. Equities in the sector are rotating higher as leverage to the metal becomes apparent. Miners with scale, low costs, and de-risked projects stand to capture outsized gains.

The broader implications are profound. Copper isn’t just wiring; it’s foundational to modern civilization. Shortages threaten economic stability, energy security, AI ambitions, even national defense. Trump has upped the US defence budget by 50 percent. Other countries are following suit. Munitions, drones, 6G networks—all are copper-intensive. And this global rearmament competes directly with civilian needs. 

Two years ago, copper was about $3.80 a pound. A year ago it was around  $4.50. As I write this, it’s approaching $6. The dollar, burdened by debt and printed promises, will continue its slide against hard assets like gold, silver, and copper. Prices could easily spike in the coming years. We’ve entered an era where physical reality trumps paper illusions.

The mining business is miserable when supply is abundant and prices languish. But when the world really needs what you have—and can’t get it elsewhere—the rewards can be life-changing. Copper is at that inflection point. The cycle is young, the supply and demand forces are real, and the upside is enormous.

I’ve built my career betting on these kinds of shifts. As always, the timeline is uncertain but the direction is unmistakable. If you buy into the right mining projects and prepare for the volatility of tariffs, geopolitics, and other unexpected disruptions, I believe you’ll be handsomely rewarded. The copper supercycle isn’t just coming—it’s here.