AFTER STORAGE, COPPER AND FIBER-OPTICS CAME TO AI 'THE HOLODOMOR'

AFTER STORING THE TRACKS, COPPER AND FIBRE-OPTICS MAY BE THE NEXT MARKET TO EXPLODE BECAUSE OF AI。

Citigroup metal strategist Charlie, who has been leapfrogging a deal in recent weeks: buy an execution price of $15,250, LME copper figures due in August to see an increase in options。

IN HIS VIEW, ALMOST ALL OF THE COPPER DEMAND GROWTH SINCE 2022 HAD COME FROM ENERGY TRANSFORMATION AND AI-RELATED SOURCES。

AS AT 14 MAY 2026, THE LME THREE MONTHS WAS APPROACHING $14,000 PER TON OF COPPER AND COMEX COPPER OPENING PRICE WAS $6.63 PER POUND. IN THE LAST 12 MONTHS, COPPER HAS RISEN 41%. IN THE LAST FOUR WEEKS, COPPER HAS INCREASED BY 10%. THIS IS THE HIGHEST PRICE IN HISTORY。

Over the past two years, the whole market has told the story of AI as a chip story, the market value of Nvidia, the capacity of TSMC, the good rate of HBM and the bottleneck of CoWos. Almost all of the discussion about "AI infrastructure" focused on the silica of the square centimetres。

BUT IN A PERSPECTIVE THAT MANY PEOPLE DON'T KNOW, AI'S NEEDS ARE SINKING FROM THE SILICONE TO THE COPPER MINE TO THE GLASS。

COPPER IS THE OIL OF THE AI ERA

The notion that supply and demand determine prices, and that there is a “blowing demand for copper”, is more straightforward in the market。

THE LME THREE MONTHS OF COPPER COLLECTED US$ 13,943 PER TON ON MAY 11, 2026, IS A NEW LME COLLECTION RECORD OF 2.7 PER CENT PER DAY. COMEX COPPER TOUCHED THE TOP OF THE DISK ON MAY 12TH AT $6.58/POUND. IN THE LAST 12 MONTHS, COPPER HAS RISEN 41%. THE LAST FOUR WEEKS, COPPER HAS GONE UP 10%。

At the beginning of 2025, copper was in the line of US$ 9,000, with a mid-year breakthrough of 12,000, an annual increase of 43 per cent, the best year of copper since 2009. In January 2026, copper broke 13,000 in its first disk. And then four months later, 14,000 is coming. This curve, more like a rediscovered asset, is being priced according to new logic。

Trafigura is the second largest metal dealer in the world. Its metal analyst, Graham Train, has dismantled a very refined demand: of the additional 10 million tons of copper consumed over the next decade, one third comes from electric vehicles, one third from electricity generation and distribution, and one third from automation, manufacturing capital expenditure and the cooling system of data centres。

And Goldman Sachs, in a study entitled "AI and Defense Place the Power Grid at the Center of Energy Security," made a more sharp assertion: copper will become the oil of the AI era. Goldman Sachs estimates that by 2030 the global grid and power infrastructure will contribute more than 60 per cent of the copper demand increase。

Sounds a little exaggerated, but it is reasonable to think carefully。

COPPER'S CONDUCTIVITY IS 100% IACS, SECOND ONLY TO SILVER IN ALL METALS. BUT SILVER IS TOO EXPENSIVE, AND COPPER IS THE ONLY ANSWER TO ALMOST ALL THE LARGE-SCALE POWER-CONDUCTING SCENES IN INDUSTRY. THE CLOSEST ALTERNATIVE IS ALUMINIUM, BUT ITS CONDUCTIVITY IS ONLY 61 PER CENT OF COPPER, WHICH MEANS THAT IT ALSO TRANSMITS ONE MW OF ELECTRICITY, AND THE ALUMINIUM LINE REQUIRES A MUCH LARGER CUT-OFF AREA, WHICH IS HEAVIER, MORE SPATIAL AND MORE HEAT-CONSUMING. THIS DIFFERENCE IS ALMOST UNACCEPTABLE IN THE CENTIMETRE SPACE OF THE CABINET OF THE DATA CENTRE。

This is especially true of heat. Copper's accelerator 401 W/(m K) is five times that of iron and eight times that of stainless steel. NVIDIA GB200 single-calories work 1,200 W, a standard cabinet 72 card, and more than 130 kW in total. This level of heat density, which can no longer hold, has to be liquid. And almost every component of the liquid cooling system that deals with the "hot" is copper cold, copper pipe, copper cold。

IN OTHER WORDS, COPPER IS NOT AN "OPT-OUT MATERIAL" FOR AI DATA CENTRES, BUT A "PHYSICAL ONLY OPTION"。

AI'S ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION IS SUBVERSIVE, SENDING ELECTRICITY TO THE DATA CENTRE IS VERY COPPER-INTENSIVE。

An AI data centre for 1 GW, which is just about 27,000 tons of copper, is needed for power distribution and offline alone. Meta Hyperion Data Centre in Louisiana, size 5GW. The copper demand for this project alone is close to 135,000 tons, which has not yet accounted for the high voltage transmission lines, transformer stations and grid upgrades required to deliver electricity to the data centre entrance。

In our past impressions, copper is an easily accessible metal, but in recent data, this impression may be subject to some adjustment。

Beginning in March 2026, the American-Iraq conflict cut off the exports of sulphur and sulphuric acid from the Middle East, which was a key input to impregnated copper refining and forced to contract production in Chilean refineries. This is also the trigger for this surge in 2026。

The more structural and macro-problem is that no super-large copper mine has been discovered globally in the past decade. According to John Meyer, an analyst of the British seller SP Angel, the next generation of new copper mining is worth $13,000 per ton and has exceeded the price of copper. The Chinese Shin-in-China super team measured a global shortfall of over 100,000 tons of refined copper in 2026; the Citi forecast was more radical, 308,000 tons。

2026 "The Holodomor"

THE STORY OF COPPER IS A CLEAR NARRATIVE. BUT IF YOU PULL YOUR PERSPECTIVE INSIDE THE AID DATA CENTRE, YOU FIND A VERY DELICATE THING: THAT PART OF THE DEMAND FOR COPPER IS BEING REPLACED。

"The next generation of artificial intelligence infrastructure will require a great deal of optical connectivity, as computing demand is growing so rapidly that the copper line is no longer sufficient to meet demand." This is the view that Huang In-hoon expressed in his interview this month。

AS WONG IN-HOON SAID, THE DATA TRANSMISSION DEMAND FOR THE AI CLUSTER IS BREAKING THE PHYSICAL LIMITS OF THE COPPER CABLE。

THERE ARE TWO FUNDAMENTAL CONSTRAINTS TO THE TRANSMISSION OF HIGH-SPEED SIGNALS FROM COPPER CABLES: A SHARP INCREASE IN SIGNAL LOSSES WITH INCREASING FREQUENCY, AND THE UNACCEPTABLE SIZE AND WEIGHT OF HIGH-FREQUENCY DOWN-BLOWN COPPER CABLES. THE BANDWIDTH BETWEEN GPU CLUSTERS IS MOVING FROM 200 G AND 400 G ALL THE WAY TO 800 G AND 1.6 T, AND COPPER CABLES CAN STRETCH FROM A FEW METRES TO SEVERAL DOZEN CENTIMETRES. THE AI CLUSTER IS OF A VANKA LEVEL, CROSS-BOARD, AND SOMETIMES CROSS-DATA CENTRE, AND COPPER IS NOT PHYSICALLY FEASIBLE。

But fibre-optics can。

This is why the wave of fibre-optics is stronger, more pure and irreversible than copper. How much is the increase in the wave of fibre-optics

CRU DATA: CHINA ' S G.652D NUDITY PRICE ROSE BY MORE THAN 80 PER CENT IN THREE MONTHS BETWEEN NOVEMBER 2025 AND JANUARY 2026. THE AVERAGE MONTHLY PRICE WAS 31.5 YUAN/CHIP KM, WITH SOME OF THE TRANSACTIONS ACTUALLY GOING BETWEEN 40 AND 50 YUAN, WITH A CUMULATIVE INCREASE OF 94 TO 144 PER CENT。

Fibre-optics, a highly priced industrial product of the past few years, more than doubled in three months。

By February 2026, high-end fibre-optics had risen even harder. G.657.A., for example, bending insensitive fibre-optics rise from 30 yuan to more than 50 yuan within a month. Sun Telecom directly called out the slogan "The Fiber Famine 2026", whose G.652D. 1 km, which was again $2.20 in 2024, increased to $3 in December 2025 and $4.10 a month later. Asia's fibre-optic prices have risen by 75 per cent overall, up seven years。

AI DATA CENTRE DEMAND FOR FIBRE-OPTICS IS A QUANTITATIVE SUBVERSION。

STL's light network business CEO Rahul Puri spoke of a number, and the first time that an avid editor saw it: an AI data centre required 36 times more fibers than the traditional CPU shelf, which was a cliff breaker。

GPU clusters work differently from CPUs. A Vanka-level training cluster would require a high-speed, non-blocked connection between all GPUs. This network structure is called the Scale-out structure, and the requirements for bandwidth are unimaginable in the CPU era. In addition to that, there is a DCI link between data centres that combines the power clusters distributed in different geographical locations into a supercomputer. A project in the Hyperion data centre in Meta has a fibre-optic demand of 8 million miles。

Or go back to the economic theory that the price is determined by supply and demand, and since the demand side is this, what about the supply side

Light Reading reported that at least one head fibre-optic manufacturer had sold out of stock throughout 2026. Data Center Dynamics reports that the delivery cycle for large clients has been extended to 20 weeks, with small clients approaching one year。

Why can't it grow? Because light rods, i.e. fibre-optic core materials, are expanding over 18 to 24 months, the process is extremely complex. Even if all the manufacturers decided to expand immediately today, it would take as early as 2027 to get new capacity. In the meantime, demand will continue only upwards。

The CEO of Clearfield, Anis Khemakhem, gave a much larger figure: by 2029, the United States alone would need to add 213.3 million miles of fibre-optic, doubling the existing 159.6 million to 372.9 million miles. In six years, the national fibre-optic stock doubled。

The biggest winner in this story is Corning Conning。

It's a glass company that was set up in 1851, made the shell of Edison's light bulb, made the glass of a television catheter, made the glass of an iPhone gorilla. Many people in this company don't even know it's alive. But it is now the core fibre-optic supplier of Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Google, AWS, Microsoft. Its share price has increased by over 75 per cent over the past year. With regard to the story of Corning Conning, there is probably no more talk about it in a new article。

The story of copper and fibre-optics appears to have only just begun to get the attention of the mass market, but the aberrant editor believes that it may be the next one following the storage track。