Copper Just Hit a Record Above $14,800 a Tonne and AI Is Partly to Blame

Copper  |  2026-08-31 02:58:49   |   By

On August 25, September Comex copper futures rose as high as $6.727 a pound, about $14,830 a tonne, beating the previous $6.714 record set on August 12. That is the headline number. The reason behind it is messier.

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): Copper has just traded above $14,800 a tonne on Comex, and the easy explanation is wrong. AI demand helps, but the sharper move came from a mine setback in Congo and a US tariff risk that has pulled metal across the Atlantic.

Copper's latest record is not a clean story about booming factories. On August 25, September Comex copper futures rose as high as $6.727 a pound, about $14,830 a tonne, beating the previous $6.714 record set on August 12. That is the headline number. The reason behind it is messier.

You can see the strain in three places at once: Congo, exchange warehouses and US ports. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that copper was being supported by tariff-driven stockpiling and tight physical supply outside America. That is the market in one sentence. A lot of buyers are not suddenly using more copper today. They are trying to get hold of it before someone else does.

Congo Made A Tight Market Nervous

Start in the Democratic Republic of Congo. On August 6, the country's mines ministry confirmed a ban on copper and cobalt concentrate exports, with possible one-year exemptions in certain cases, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights. That caveat matters. It means the ban is not a simple shut-off valve. Still, in a market already worried about supply, it gave traders one more reason to pay up.

Then came Kamoa-Kakula. Zijin Mining said in its half-year report that its share of output from the giant Congolese copper complex could fall by as much as 57,000 tons this year after flooding and earlier seismic disruption, Bloomberg reported through Mining Weekly. Zijin owns just over 44% of the project. Ivanhoe Mines, its partner, had already cut 2026 guidance for Kamoa-Kakula in April to 290,000 to 330,000 tonnes of copper anode or blister, down from an earlier 380,000 to 420,000 tonnes.

That is not a small mine missing a quarterly target. Kamoa-Kakula produced 388,838 tonnes of copper in concentrate in 2025, according to Ivanhoe's own January production release. When a project of that size runs below plan, the market notices.

Warehouse data tells the same story in a less dramatic way. LME copper inventories fell for 42 straight sessions to a five-year low in August, according to OilPrice, while US importers pulled in more than 200,000 tonnes of refined copper in July, the biggest monthly volume in at least 12 years. A lot of that metal did not vanish. It moved.

America Is Sucking In The Metal

The Trump administration has already imposed tariffs on some copper products, but refined copper remains the open question. The White House's 2025 proclamation recorded a Commerce Department recommendation for a phased tariff on refined copper: 15% from January 1, 2027, and 30% from January 1, 2028. As of late August 2026, that refined-copper decision still has not been made public.

So traders are behaving rationally. They are shipping metal into the US before a possible duty arrives. OilPrice reported that copper held across Comex warehouses, LME-registered stock and private US port storage has pushed the country's total stockpile past 1 million tonnes. That helps explain why the US futures price can scream higher while the rest of the world worries about what is left outside American warehouses.

This is the part buyers should care about. If you use copper in wiring, connectors, cooling systems, electrical gear or construction, the headline price is only half the problem. The other half is location. Metal sitting in the wrong warehouse does not help your factory floor.

AI Adds Pressure, But It Is Not The Whole Story

The AI angle is real. It is also easy to overstate. Skillings, citing sector research, has put AI-oriented data center copper use at roughly 30 to 47 tonnes per megawatt inside the facility, rising to an estimated 100 to 150 tonnes per megawatt when substations, transmission lines and redundant power feeds are included. That is a lot of copper before a single model runs.

Nvidia's Vera Rubin and Blackwell systems make the point plain enough. Every hyperscaler racing to add more high-density compute is also racing for power distribution, transformers, busbars and cabling. You will not hear that line item get the same attention as GPUs on an earnings call. It deserves more.

Frankly, though, AI did not flood a mine in Congo or write the US tariff calendar. The rally above $14,800 happened because long-term demand met short-term panic. Data centers give copper a stronger floor over time. Supply shocks and tariff stockpiling are what put a match under the price this month.

The move has already shown how fragile it is. MarketWatch reported this week that US copper futures hit a fresh record while London prices stayed closer to their own all-time peak, a split driven by tariff fears rather than a clean global shortage. That kind of price gap can narrow quickly if Washington settles the refined-copper question or if metal starts moving back out of US storage.

For now, the hard facts remain. Kamoa-Kakula is still recovering. Congo's concentrate-export ban is still part of the market conversation. US tariff risk is still open. And AI data centers still need more copper in the ground, in the grid and inside the building than most software investors have ever had to think about.

Courtesy: www.startupfortune.com