More than US$3.5 billion of equity and debt financing and small acquisitions announced so far this quarter signals rising momentum in the global copper space on the back of a circa-14% gain in the metal’s price this year, with analysts suggesting the shift has higher gears to reach.

Recent Korean and US export-import bank funding offers to Glencore and Ivanhoe Electric, respectively, show the “battle for copper units” is on. CRU senior analyst Piers Montgomery told an Australian copper forum this month electrification demands of the global economy were going to double in the next five years, “and we all know that without copper that just simply can’t happen”.

“We are in a battle for a scarce resource here and that is why we are seeing price formation really start to take a leg up,” he said.

Of course the scarce resource is not copper in the ground at these prices – not yet anyway. S&P Global said earlier this month the rate and size of new major copper discoveries remained subdued compared to previous decades. “Total copper discovered post-2000 remains lower than the total volume discovered during the 1990s alone,” it said.

“Copper demand is accelerating across multiple fronts yet the pipeline of new copper deposits continues to thin.”

Rather, the scarcity call is about physical copper coming down the proverbial pipe.

“There can be no doubt at all that for 25 years we have underinvested in productive capacity around copper,” veteran resources investor Rick Rule said in a Kitco interview this week.

“We’ve underinvested in exploration. We’ve underinvested in development. We’ve underinvested in all parts of the copper business and you can’t make up for that systemic underinvestment quickly.

“There is no doubt in my mind that in five years copper prices will be substantially shorter than they are today. I’m just surprised by the strength in copper today.

“Part of that has to do with production shortfalls … The difficulty that Kamoa-Kakula experienced, the difficulty that Grasberg experienced, the self-inflicted wounds that Codelco has had from underinvestment. But some of it is due to a much stronger global economy than I would have expected that we would experience.

“The economy has surprised me to the upside and copper has done very well.”

BMO commodities analyst Helen Amos said in a recent interview: “We’ve seen continued news flow that gives more uncertainty on mine supply. It’s not that the copper is not out there. It’s the copper and the projects that are off the scale … for the major miners to want to develop and take on board the risk [at current project capex levels].

“It’s also those large, chunky greenfield projects that are becoming harder to find.

“We are seeing growth from smaller, disparate sources but we’re not seeing enough growth in mine supply essentially. And a lot of that is just simple geology: the old deposits are depleting and there hasn’t been enough capex in the industry to develop new projects.

“So it’s not just the tariff trade [elevating copper prices].”

Montgomery agreed new US copper tariff threats had spurred metal prices at a time when an estimated 660,000 tonnes of copper sat in US warehouses and there was perhaps a further one million tonnes “off exchange” in the country as it sought to underwrite a massive data centre and infrastructure build.

He doesn’t see the stockpile going anywhere fast, to dampen prices. In the meantime the tariff bluster and constraint on available copper stocks was having the desired effect on prices. Montgomery said: “If it wasn’t for the fact that you know the guy in the White House is a bit crackers you’d say it was genius, wouldn’t you?”

As indicated by Mining Beacon’s financing and M&A deal tracker, and the US and Korean EXIM bank overtures in particular, the copper deal space is heating up. Prices coupled with constraints on rapid, large-scale asset development are also stoking activity that hasn’t been seen in the sector for a long time.

BHP’s foreshadowed alliance with the European Union’s biggest producer of mined copper, KGHM Polska Miedz, and significant district-level pacts in Chile, Argentina and Australia, underline the sector’s consolidation and cooperation urgency aimed at unlocking more brownfield copper units.

The BHP move followed its earlier MoU signing in Antofagasta, Chile, with Sierra Gorda SCM (KGHM 55%/South32 45%) to open up cooperation between the neighbouring BHP-run Spence copper operation and Sierra Gorda in one of the country’s most important copper-producing areas.

“There’s a lot that can be unlocked there through collaboration at a high level between the mining companies,” Montgomery said.

“We’re starting to see that … with the MoU for example, between Spence and Sierra Gorda, where effectively you’ve got underutilised capacity at the SX plant at Spence and you’ve got Sierra Gorda, who are otherwise going to look at building a $600 million, 30,000 tonne-a-year SX train.

“I think potentially that district-level development is what could define this era of supply.”

Fox-Davies Capital analyst Gaius King contends that “the world’s largest super-cycle in commodities has begun” and copper is somewhere near the middle of it. A second contention is that, “copper is something that people don’t look at very much.” If they did they would notice the price had gone from US$1.29/lb in 2004 to above $6.50/lb now. In inflation-adjusted terms, the “copper price has gone nowhere for two decades”.

“We use 28 million tonnes of copper a year; we mine 23Mt and the difference comes from recycling,” King says.

“One of the key concepts you have to understand about a super-cycle – and we saw this with the China boom – is that there is no recycling. You get all this growth in demand but there’s no recycling of copper. So the demand for the underlying commodity is actually stronger again.”

King also highlights the world’s biggest copper mine, Escondida, which produced about 1.2Mt of copper in 2004. It produced 1.26Mt in operator BHP’s FY2026, when copper overtook iron ore as its biggest income and earnings generator for the first time.

“BHP bought OZ Minerals [in 2023 for $6.4 billion] for two operating mines and one development mine because they didn’t want to mine their own projects,” King says. “They didn’t want to build them because the capex has gone up.

“We know that a [new] Escondida – this mine, this size – does not exist anymore on Earth because we would have found it by now.

“And yet, in 14 years, we’re going to need eight more of these.”

Rick Rule is speaking at IMARC 2026 at ICC Sydney from October 27-29. S&P Global is an exhibitor (Stand B02) at the event.