Two weeks ago, a boiler failed at a smelter in Gresik, Indonesia.
This wasn’t some minor operation, mind you. It was one of the largest copper processing plants on the planet.
Alarms blared as workers scrambled to execute an emergency shutdown, and then just like that, a meaningful slice of the world’s smelting capacity went dark.
At the same time, mining crews nearly 10,000 miles away in the mountains of Chile were digging themselves out after a harsh storm tore through the copper belt region. This shut down operations at some of the biggest mines on Earth.
Of course, officials over in the Democratic Republic of Congo had just finished signing something far quieter than a storm or a boiler explosion, yet every bit as disruptive.
They enacted a new ban on exporting copper concentrate out of the country.
That’s three unplanned events that shook copper markets, leading to the all-time high prices we saw on August 6th, when a pound topped $6.70.
A week later, prices were still holding near $6.61 per pound.
Folks, that’s a price spike not going to abate anytime soon.
Here’s why…
What’s interesting to us is that this situation isn’t about a single mine having a bad quarter, but rather a kink forming in the global supply chain.
Believe me, when a market is running that tight, it doesn’t take a coordinated crisis to break it.
All it needs is a little bad luck, such as a boiler failing, a storm impacting operations, or a legislative signature restricting exports.
Recently, the eggheads over at Goldman Sachs came out saying that the copper deficit outside the United States could exceed 640,000 metric tons this year alone.
That’s a far uglier number than the global balance figures that most others are reporting, all because it strips out a tiny little detail that changes everything.
Truth is, copper warehouses inside the United States are sitting at record levels right now.
You’d think that would be good news for the rest of the world, but it isn’t.
Why? Well, earlier this year we saw tariff threats blow open a record-wide spread between copper traded on the CME here in the U.S. and copper traded on the LME overseas.
Naturally, traders responded exactly the way we’d expect, too. They rushed huge volumes of copper cathodes into American warehouses to capture that spread, locking in the arbitrage.
But that copper isn’t going anywhere.
It’ll sit here in the U.S. while Europe and Asia deal with the shortage on their own.
So the record inventory everyone is pointing to as a cushion will only cushion one country — us!
If you’re wondering why this crisis won’t resolve itself once Gresik’s boiler gets fixed, or the storm passes in Chile, it’s because of one little tidbit that most people conveniently forget.
Remember, a new copper mine takes the better part of a decade to bring from discovery to production. You can’t fast-track geology, dear reader, which is a bit of a problem when demand isn’t slowing down from any direction.
In fact, demand is accelerating from all directions.
AI data centers need copper for power distribution at a scale nobody budgeted for two years ago.
Don’t forget that the broader grid buildout we’ve covered extensively this year runs on copper wiring, copper transformers, copper everything.
There’s no getting around the fact that EVs use roughly four times the copper of a traditional car.
Even before this month’s trifecta, copper’s long-comfortable supply cushion is expected to dry up — the first genuinely structural deficit the market’s seen since 2009.
That’s exactly why copper made the cut when the government expanded its official critical minerals list. This is the list behind the executive orders, the export controls, and the billions in federal money we’ve tracked all year for lithium, rare earths, and uranium.
Copper is no longer a side story in this critical metal crisis.
It’s now officially part of the main event.
More importantly, the structural gap underneath all three of these events isn’t going to fade once the headlines move on to the next story.
You can bet the smart money is positioning now.
Until next time,
Keith Kohl
Check us out on YouTube!A true insider in the technology and energy markets, Keith’s research has helped everyday investors capitalize from the rapid adoption of new technology trends and energy transitions. Keith connects with hundreds of thousands of readers as the Managing Editor of Energy & Capital, as well as the investment director of Angel Publishing’s Energy Investor and Technology and Opportunity.
For nearly two decades, Keith has been providing in-depth coverage of the hottest investment trends before they go mainstream — from the shale oil and gas boom in the United States to the red-hot EV revolution currently underway. Keith and his readers have banked hundreds of winning trades on the 5G rollout and on key advancements in robotics and AI technology.
Keith’s keen trading acumen and investment research also extend all the way into the complex biotech sector, where he and his readers take advantage of the newest and most groundbreaking medical therapies being developed by nearly 1,000 biotech companies. His network includes hundreds of experts, from M.D.s and Ph.D.s to lab scientists grinding out the latest medical technology and treatments. You can join his vast investment community and target the most profitable biotech stocks in Keith’s Topline Trader advisory newsletter.
AI Alert Nvidia CEO Just Confirmed the Obvious
Jensen Huang just said something most investors still haven’t internalized:
“Trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure needs to be built”.
Not software. Not apps.
Infrastructure. Power generation. Grids.
Data centers. Factories. Materials.
The AI models already work.
Now the physical buildout has to catch up.
AI doesn’t scale on code. It scales on electricity, metals, and hard assets.
No power → no AI.
No grid → no AI.
No materials → no AI.
Yet Wall Street is still pricing this like a tech cycle — not an infrastructure one.
The assets that sit directly beneath the AI buildout — the chokepoints — still trade like afterthoughts.
Small caps. Sub-$4 stocks. Multi-billion-dollar resource systems.
That mismatch doesn’t last. The biggest gains come before infrastructure is obvious — not after it’s built.
I’ve mapped four U.S. resource chokepoints sitting directly beneath the AI infrastructure boom Huang says will cost trillions.
