Ivanhoe Electric is in advanced negotiations to sell copper from its Santa Cruz project in Arizona as demand from artificial intelligence infrastructure and power grids intensifies competition for United States supply. Chief executive Taylor Melvin told Bloomberg News that the company has attracted interest from traditional commodity traders and strategic partners, and that offtake agreements could include financing to help develop the mine. He declined to identify the prospective buyers. “We need a lot more than Santa Cruz to fill that gap,” Melvin said, referring to the divide between US copper demand and domestic production.
The financing stack is assembling around the talks. In August Ivanhoe received a preliminary project letter from the Export-Import Bank of the United States outlining up to 1.1 billion dollars in potential debt financing, a preliminary step rather than a final commitment, after President Donald Trump publicly backed financing for Santa Cruz at an August 7 mining roundtable. The company is also discussing project financing with about a dozen commercial banks.
Santa Cruz would produce copper cathode on site, a refined product that can go directly into wire, cable and foil, which Ivanhoe promotes as a lower emissions route that avoids conventional smelting and refining. A preliminary feasibility study last year put initial development costs at 1.24 billion dollars; the first phase figure now stands at 1.4 billion dollars, with first production targeted for 2029.
The pattern is visible elsewhere in Arizona, where Amazon has agreed to buy copper from Gunnison Copper’s mine produced with Rio Tinto leaching technology for its data centres. For Santa Cruz, binding offtake and debt commitments are the evidence that buyer interest has become funding; until they are announced, the project remains a well supported plan in a market where copper prices hover near record highs and new domestic mines take most of a decade to build.