Copper is becoming increasingly strategic to governments and industries as artificial intelligence, power grid investment and defence spending lift demand, investors told CNBC, and the industrial metal has outperformed gold this year as the need to secure reliable supplies has intensified. Copper has rallied 15.8 percent year to date and is up more than 30 percent over the past 12 months. By comparison, gold futures have slipped 4.11 percent year to date and 4.52 percent over 12 months, and spot gold is about 4 percent lower this year. Monday’s settlements in the market tables kept the two on their separate paths: copper at 6.57 dollars a pound, up 0.46 percent, and gold at 4,139.10 dollars an ounce, down 0.5 percent.
The investor case, made as LME Week began in London on Monday, is that the demand is structural. Speaking to CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe, Ivanhoe Electric chief executive Taylor Melvin said countries, regions and industries are increasingly focused on securing access to metals for national security, economic growth and technology infrastructure. “It’s certainly a good time to be in copper mining globally, and specifically in the United States,” Melvin said. “We’re really in a world right now where the metals that we used to refer to, and still do, as critical metals are really becoming strategic metals, in every sense of the word.” He argued copper demand from data centres is close to inelastic, since the metal’s cost does not decide whether a hyperscaler builds, and identified defence budgets as a further source of demand.
The counterweight is the tariff premium documented in yesterday’s edition: a large share of the world’s visible copper sits in US warehouses because the Commerce Department recommended a 15 percent tariff on refined copper imports from January 1, 2027, and no final decision has been announced, while Chinese inventories are exceptionally low and premiums there are rising. Whether the rally survives an AI correction therefore depends on which layer of the price is real demand and which is stockbuilding ahead of a levy that may never arrive.