Something I heard recently from a US electrical infrastructure manufacturing exec: "I'd rather have copper in my warehouse than cash in the bank, because based on what I'm seeing in supply chains, I'm concerned that cash may not be able to secure me actual copper at some point."

Copper is trading around $14,470 per tonne today, which is ~$400 per tonne (~3%) below its all-time high....despite no news on tariffs and the first Fed rate hike in 3 years. Copper is on course for a weekly gain of ~3%. This is because physical buying has STRENGTHENED this past week. The Yangshan premium, the amount paid above the London Metal Exchange (LME) price to import copper cathode into China, has increased to $124 per tonne today... the highest level since November 2022 (chart below 👇). And, the COMEX continues to trade at a premium to the LME (the 3-month is ~$140 per tonne & the 6-month is ~$400 per tonne). This is not surprising... Governments worldwide are investing heavily in grid infrastructure, rearmament and defence... while hyperscalers are racing to be the first with the largest data-centre capacity. There will continue to be significant buyers of physical copper, whether the Fed continues to hike or not.

According IEA, global copper demand is rising, while supply from existing and announced projects is projected to fall short. That makes developing new, high-quality copper resources increasingly important. Kamoa-Kakula is part of the answer. It's one of the world’s highest-grade major copper mines with production set to ramp up to more than 500,000 tonnes annually from 2028. $IVN

Anthropic plans to build a 2.14 gigawatt data centre in Australia. Using the assumption from Helen Amos at @BMO that 35,000 tonnes of copper goes into each gigawatt of data centre capacity… the copper required for this data centre alone will be approximately 10% of Australia’s annual copper production.

Mirae Asset Global Investments is launching its first copper-focused ETF trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, opening up the opportunity for Asian investors to buy listed copper miners. Mirae is the company behind the highly successful Global X Copper Miners ETF (COPX), which has ballooned in size to $7.4 billion in assets and owns 2.6% of @IvanhoeMines_ & ~1% of @ivanhoeelectric

At a meeting last week chaired by President Félix Tshisekedi Tshilombo, the Council of Ministers of the #DRC🇨🇩# approved the creation of a task force to speed up the implementation of the country’s #CriticalMinerals# strategic partnership with the #USA🇺🇲#.

We export ~20% of the 99.7%-pure copper anodes we produce at our Kamoa-Kakula copper smelter along the Lobito Railway Corridor to the Atlantic port of Lobito in Angola. We are proud supporters of the Lobito Corridor and the investment made by @trafigura and @DFCgov to improve the capacity of the rail line, which is fast becoming a major rail artery for copper and critical minerals from the DRC Copperbelt to the global market. The Lobito Corridor is the shortest and most direct export and import route from the Copperbelt to the seaborne international market. Cheaper logistics increases the amount of economically recoverable critical minerals mined in the Copperbelt, lowering cut-off grades. @IvanhoeMines_ @kamoa_copper_sa

It was a pleasure to play the role of bookends for the first 300 episodes of the essential @Smarter_Markets Podcast with the always switched-on @DavidVGreely. I was the podcast’s first guest way back in the dark ages of 2020, so this episode gave us a great opportunity to look back at all the dramatic changes in mining and global supply chains for critical metals over the last six years. The world has evolved… it makes for excellent listening. A big thank you to David, Chief Economist at @abaxx_tech, and the whole team at Abaxx.

Today, Russia announced the ban of sulphuric acid exports. Russia also banned the export of elemental sulphur late last year to protect its agricultural industry, as its domestic production has been declining. Like the sulphur export ban, the sulphuric acid ban is said to be in place until the end of the year. Russia is the 12th largest exporter of sulphuric acid and almost all of it goes to Kazakhstan… the world’s tenth largest copper producer. While we suspect that the ban on the ‘King of Chemicals’ (sulphuric acid) won’t make a big impact on the production of the ‘King of Metals’ (copper)… we are unlikely to see the record-high prices for sulphur and sulphuric acid prices come down any time soon. In the DRC, we are already seeing high-strength sulphuric acid prices traded at over $1,000 per tonne… up well over 100% in the past 3 months alone. While it’s not surprising to see countries prioritise food security and domestic supply chains over global free trade… any balkanizing of supply chains is nothing but inflationary.

We started @Smarter_Markets to put a spotlight on issues surrounding trust, identity, market infrastructure and technology that we believe are important, and to see if there were others out there who felt the same way. It turns out there were a lot of people who felt the same way. Our very first episode was a conversation 6 years ago with @robert_ivanhoe. He returned yesterday for our 300th, and at the end of his conversation with @DavidVGreely, added a postscript reflecting on Abaxx’s journey since that initial interview in November 2020. Thank you to Robert, and all of our Abaxx shareholders, for the continued support as we spend each day building smarter markets for the global supply chain transformation and the transition to an AI-augmented economy (and weekends bringing you more SmarterMarkets).

I like this chart by Chris Lafemina at @Jefferies. Chris clearly highlights the challenge of bringing new large-scale copper projects online. Even world‑class assets, operated by experienced management teams, have struggled in recent years to achieve design capacity on schedule. Collectively, the projects in his analysis delivered cumulative copper production 30% BELOW TARGET (36% below target if you exclude Kamoa-Kakula, which was delivered above target, as shown in the table). Copper supply forecasts for the next wave of new copper projects are clearly overestimated. As an industry, we will increase hurdle rates to fully account for the many construction and ramp-up risks, which increase exponentially as projects get larger. As Chris points out, this implies projects will require a higher incentive price to be built... which will lead to higher copper prices. Risk-averse management teams may instead prefer to buy, rather than build, production capacity... but this doesn't solve our lack of supply growth problem... which will lead to higher copper prices. @kamoa_copper_sa @IvanhoeMines_ @ivanhoeelectric

This is a great chart… We are fortunate that our geologists at @IvanhoeMines_ are discovering copper in the Western Forelands Shelf, on the western edge of the DRC Copperbelt, at a cost of less than $10 per tonne of copper discovered... which is over two orders of magnitude cheaper than today’s average implied discovery cost, accounting to this chart.

"Want to build a data center? Copper. Want to go to the moon? Copper. Want air conditioning, a microwave, or an electric toothbrush? Copper. Want a computer? Internet? Ever use a phone? It's copper." On the very first episode of SmarterMarkets™, @Robert_Ivanhoe shared why copper will be the winning commodity in the coming years. Now, 6 years later, he returns for our 300th episode to tell us what mining, tech, governments, and markets are doing – and need to be doing – in a week when LME copper prices hit a new record high.

Thanks to the plugged-in folks at Bloomberg for giving me the chance to ring some alarm bells that I think everyone needs to hear: “We are really looking at the weaponization of certain critical raw materials in the supply chain and it's really a profound national security interest,” I told Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway on their Odd Lots podcast. “And the metals we need to do something about that are the same metals that are needed for drone warfare or the defense from drone warfare. So we're seeing a sort of perfect storm in a balkanized world economy where demand for certain critical metals is going to infinity.” “We need to mine as much copper in the next 18 years as we did in the last 10,000 years, just to maintain global 3% GDP growth without the electrification of the world economy…In the last 30 years, all the capital on Wall Street went into sexy technology like the Internet and broadband and Netflix and wireless but when all the money goes in that direction, we didn't put money into basic raw materials, which are the foundation on which everything sits.” Huge thanks to @bloomberg’s hugely talented @TheStalwart, @TracyAlloway, @kevlloydlozano, @carmenarmen, Cale Brooks and of course the one and only @ryanchilcote for making it all happen. For more about how we got here and how, maybe, foresight and better technology can help us find our way out, listen to the episode on Apple podcasts, Spotify, youtube or at: @IvanhoeMines_ @ivanhoeelectric @SunriseMetals @IPulseGroup @IvanhoeAtlantic @bluesparkenergy

"Mining with a greater purpose" means more than producing the critical minerals the world needs for the energy transition. It means creating lasting value where we operate through local jobs, stronger schools, and community development programs across the DRC and South Africa. Learn about our sustainable livelihoods initiatives: