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Two Congress Passes for the Price of One
Code 2FOR1 gets you two WeAreDevelopers World Congress passes for the price of one — so don't make the trip to Silicon Valley solo.
San José, CA · September 23–25, 2026. 10,000+ developers, 500+ speakers, 20+ stages, and the full software development lifecycle in one place.
On stage: Kelsey Hightower, Thomas Dohmke (former GitHub CEO), Christine Yen (Honeycomb), Olivier Pomel (Datadog) — the people building the tools you use every day. Three days of AI, agents, cloud, security, and architecture, plus workshops, live coding, and the official Congress party.
Bring the builder you'd want in the room with you.
The Bingham Canyon copper mine, Utah. Photo: Farragutful (CC BY-SA 4.0).
A single AI data center can swallow as much copper as a small city. Multiply that by the hundreds now being built, add every electric car and power line, and you get the quiet crisis of 2026: the world is running short of the metal that carries electricity.
A record almost nobody noticed
Copper hit an all-time high in June 2026, around 14,000 dollars a tonne, roughly double its old normal (LME). And that is with the shortage barely begun.
Why the sudden hunger?
Three things arrived at once: electric cars, a rebuilt power grid, and AI data centers. All of them are copper machines.
An electric car uses about 83 kilograms of copper, against 23 in a gas car. An AI data center needs 20 to 40 tonnes for every megawatt it draws. The grid alone needs more than a million extra tonnes a year by 2030 (IEA). Demand went vertical.
And you cannot just dig more
A new copper mine takes 10 to 20 years to find, permit and build. Supply cannot answer a demand spike quickly. The International Energy Agency sees the world about 30 percent short of the copper it needs by 2035.
You can build a data center in two years. A copper mine takes twenty.
Copper is up roughly 50% over the past two years to record highs, driven mainly by grid and power infrastructure, with AI data centers emerging as a sharp new demand vector.
Mining is spread across Chile, Peru and the Congo. But the next step, smelting and refining the ore into usable metal, is not. China now refines about half the world's copper, up from 15 percent twenty years ago. Whoever runs the furnaces holds quiet power over the price.
Who's who along the chain
The players at each step:
Miners: Codelco (Chile's state giant), BHP (Escondida), Freeport-McMoRan, Glencore and Antofagasta; the ore comes mostly from Chile, Peru and the Congo.
Smelters and refiners, the chokepoint: China's Jiangxi Copper and Tongling lead, with Europe's Aurubis behind. China refines about half the world's copper.
End users: EV makers like Tesla and BYD, grid utilities, and the data-center builders behind the AI boom.
The tariff scramble
Washington noticed. Starting August 2025, it hit fabricated copper i.e. pipes, wire, cable, connectors with Section 232 tariffs of up to 50 percent, while pointedly exempting the refined cathode the world actually trades. Traders had front-loaded that exempted metal into the US anyway, betting the levy would be broad; when it wasn't, US prices cratered nearly 20 percent in a single day. But the pull never really stopped: US refined-copper imports roughly doubled, and COMEX stockpiles ballooned to a record ~650,000 tonnes, draining warehouses elsewhere and holding American copper at a stubborn premium to the rest of the world. The open question is refined copper itself, a proposed 15 percent duty from 2027, rising to 30 percent in 2028, hinging on a Commerce review that was due June 30, 2026. Rebuilding a domestic copper industry is slow and costly, but that is the bet.
The Wrap-up
Copper is the physical speed limit on electrification and AI. Forget the day's price.
Watch two things: how fast mine supply falls behind demand, and who controls the furnaces. The answer to the second is Beijing with over half the world's smelting capacity. But here's the tell: even China's smelters are now starved for ore, refining at zero or negative processing fees.
The real chokepoint isn't the furnace. It's the feedstock. Whoever secures that sets the pace for the entire build-out.
While your trucks are running, calls are going to voicemail.
Every missed call is a job your competitor just booked. Podium's AI Employee responds in under 2 minutes, qualifies the lead, and schedules the job — while your crew keeps working.
One last thing.
This space moves fast, faster than any one person can fully keep up with, me included. I'm learning right alongside you. I just try to stay a step out on the edge so you don't have to. If I ever get something wrong, tell me: email me anytime at [email protected], and if you're up for it, let's grab a coffee.
That's an open invite to everyone reading, free or paid.
Talk soon,
Gaurav
Silicon & Steel
https://siliconandsteel.co/supply-chain/
