Data center demand is skyrocketing as the generative AI revolution continues at pace. The racks of servers already use around 1.5% of global electricity, but by 2030, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects their power demand to more than double to roughly 945TWh a year, with AI the single biggest driver of that surge.
Beyond energy and water use, and the insatiable demand for chips that has driven Nvidia to record highs and triggered an arms race between Nvidia’s GPUs and the tensor processing units (TPUs) favoured by Google, there’s another resource that’s in increasingly short supply: copper.
Copper is integral to data centers and to the AI revolution. It runs through the high-voltage lines that feed hyperscale campuses, the medium-voltage cables across those sites, the busbars that bring power into server halls, and the windings inside the cooling pumps that stop racks of GPUs from overheating and cooking themselves. It’s also already in short supply. Global refined copper demand is about 28 million tonnes this year, up from 2025 forecasts made just a year ago by the Copper Council. Demand is expected to keep rising, driven by electric vehicles, renewables, grid upgrades, and data centers.
The global copper market is now sliding into a deficit. The International Copper Study Group now expects a refined copper shortfall of around 150,000 tonnes in 2026, reversing what had been a forecast surplus of more than 200,000 tonnes. Investment bank UBS is even more worried about the supply gap, forecasting deficits of 230,000 tonnes in 2025 and more than 400,000 tonnes in 2026 as mine disruptions in Chile, Peru and Indonesia collide with rising demand.
“From my side, it's positive, it's a part of the general electrification story, and copper has to play an important role in that,” says Peter Schmitz, director of global copper markets research at Wood Mackenzie. “Copper is lucky in that it's a commodity that's quite widely used in various sectors and data centers.”
Big box problems
Wood Mackenzie estimates that roughly 700,000 tonnes of copper will go into data centers globally between now and 2030, in the “box itself” — the facility and its internal power systems. On top of that, Schmitz says there could be as much as a further 5 million tonnes tied up in new transmission and distribution infrastructure to bring power to those sites; CRU’s central case assumes about 1.1 million tonnes of that grid copper is directly associated with data centers.
In a market measured in tens of millions of tonnes a year, those numbers don’t sound catastrophic. Other forecasters are in the same ballpark. Macquarie Bank estimates between 330,000 and 420,000 tonnes of copper will be used in data centers by 2030. Yet Sprott, an asset manager, believes copper demand will be far more aggressive due to data centers. They estimate data centers will need about 1.1 million tonnes of copper annually by 2030, or close to 3% of global demand.
(Image credit: Nvidia)
That’s good news for those selling copper. Data-center developers — especially the hyperscale cloud providers now racing to deploy generative AI —are among the few buyers in the world who can’t easily delay or downsize projects based on metals prices. But it’s worse news for the broader copper market, given its supply-demand deficit. Even a few hundred thousand tonnes of extra, price-insensitive demand can move prices for everyone else.
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