Copper

“The world does not have a copper discovery problem. We have a copper recovery problem.”

“So at Endolith, we use microbes and data to pull more copper out of material that's already been mined at operations that already exist.”

“It is the most effective non-precious material for transmitting electrons, and so every time we think about grid stabilization, electrification, or things like AI data centers, the copper backbone underpins all of it.”

“Copper is the fundamental linchpin in how humans are able to exist in the next thousand years. If we cannot fix it now, that is the thing that I truly believe will cause mass impacts to society.”

“Demand is doubling by twenty-thirty-five.”

“We need more copper between now and twenty-fifty than in the history of human civilization. That includes the Bronze Age.”

“What we do at Endolith is we drive in our bio rig. It is where we grow our microbes on site. It has instrumentation. It has the ability to upload data, and we grow microbes. We grow them, and we plug them directly into those sulfuric acid irrigation lines. Not…”

“In lab, we've seen 1.7 to 1.9 times greater uplift, but depending on the complexity, if it's primary or secondary sulfides or oxides, it can change and it can vary so much.”

“There's no downstream processing. These bugs don't accumulate copper inside of them to where we have to, like, split them open and harvest the copper. It's not like that. They just facilitate liberation of more copper faster.”

“The structural logic at the end of the day is going to hold regardless of who's in office, because you can't electrify anything. You can't build AI data centers without copper, and much of the world's current refining and processing capacity sits outside the U…”

“You can add domestic supply without new permitting, which makes it the fastest lever that the country has.”

“Inside the data center, you have speeds are increasing, bandwidths are increasing, and copper can no longer carry these signals the distances they need to go.”

“Another will be around the chip architectures, and then another one will be around the movement of data, and so we're going from a regime of copper to a regime of light.”

“Solar power per megawatt takes five amounts, five times the amount of copper than a typical base load CCGT gas-fired turbine.”

“Data centers for a one gigawatt AI factory now, you need 50,000 tons of copper per gigawatt, and we're gonna start building 15 gigawatts of these things per year.”

“An electric car consumes five or six times the copper than a traditional internal combustion engine.”

“Over the next 18 years, We're gonna need seven hundred million tons of copper. Over the next 18 years, we're gonna need as much copper as we mined in the last 10,000 years.”

“I thought the best performing asset was going to be copper, yeah.”

“Astera, their biggest product is going to be a switch. You use both copper and optics to connect switches to accelerators. And so definitionally, if you're a switch company or an accelerator company, you cannot be a copper loser because you're going to be on t…”

“You have commitments to spend money, but the actual ability to benefit from the spend of money, and even the ability to deploy it, those are Severely limited by actual supplies of chips and workers to build the buildings themselves. And of course, even the tel…”

“There's a scenario two, three years from now where there's going to be less copper and more optical, or at least like maybe not less copper, but more optical, right? Because it can transmit data faster, but there's limitations. It needs to be longer distance a…”

“NVIDIA's GB 200 NVL 72 server rack uses over 5000 copper cables. There's 72 GPUs wired together, but you need 5000 copper wires to get it all to work together. If you stretched out all of the copper wire in an NVL 72, From one side to another, it would go two …”

“Data centers broadly will be using half a million tons of copper annually in a few years.”

“You know copper's up 26% in a month?”

“Amazon's buying the first new copper produced in America in over a decade.”

“70% of the global supply of copper is currently locked away in, or that's not economical to refine into actual copper right now.”

“And if you look through that lens, the asset that is set up to go absolutely parabolic is copper.”

“And right now, Jason, we are on a path by 2040 where we will be short about 70% of the global supply at current course and speed.”

“People are talking about optics now, not only between data center, but also within the data center, because copper comes to its limits how much power it can deliver at what energy that is power that is lost.”

“The scarce resource is not lithium or copper metal in the ground. It's actually information. The scarce resource are not the ore deposits. And the scarce resource is the information about where the ore deposits are located.”

“It is the highest highest grade large copper deposit that is not yet a mine. The average of operating copper mines today is that the concentration of copper in the ore is, is about 0.6%. So if you mine a thousand kilograms of ore, not including the non-ore roc…”

“That means the economics are much better, because if you compare a high-grade and a low-grade deposit, a five percent and a 0.5% deposit, if they're producing the same amount of copper, they have the same revenue, But the high grade deposit, if you have 10 tim…”

“To build, you know, to build a future that is powered by batteries and AI, by mid-century, we will need to mine, over the next 25 years, more copper than has been mined so far in all of human history.”

“Where the substrate metal foil that the negative bread is attached to, usually in lithium ion, has to be copper. In sodium ion, it can be aluminum, and that's lighter, it's cheaper it has some other benefits that we can get into later, but apart from all of th…”

“It's a much smaller market than any of the others I just mentioned, I should note, but the demand growth trajectory is also steeper, and it's got all the makings of a super volatile commodity landscape.”

“If you just look at muscle meat, high in B-II, high in zinc, high in iron, not a lot of copper, not a lot of folate, not a lot of biotin. Liver has all that stuff. Liver has copper, which balances zinc.”

“The Duluth complex actually where New Range is located, which is in northeastern Minnesota, contains 95% of America's nickel, 88% of Cobalt and 33% of our copper.”

“There's enough copper to build 2.6 terawatts of wind capacity.”

“The simulation showed that you have to replace only one of the lead atoms, not any of the other ones, in order for this to work. And that could explain why everyone's having different results in the lab trying to reproduce this.”

“Now in something like sea floor massive sulfides, The grade can be 10 times as high as a typical terrestrial copper mine.”

“We need it for transmission lines, in solar and wind projects, three to five tons per megawatt, actually.”

“And especially in EVs, like really in, in electric vehicles, they use like two and a half times as much copper as a traditional internal combustion engine vehicle does.”

“But just to contextualize the scale of the challenge here, we mine around five times as much copper as we do those other three minerals, lithium, nickel, and cobalt combined.”

“45% of the copper in the world is used in the grid or in electricity or any application that it's either in the production or the transmission of electrons, or the use of those electrons.”

“The general number is that the world consumes roughly 28 to twenty-nine million tons of copper a year. Of those, Something like 5,000,006 million come from recycling or scrap, or there's a recovery of copper around that, that helps you. But in general, what is…”

“The main producer of copper is chile. And I'm Chilean, and we're based in Chile as a company. And Chile produces roughly one-third of the copper. Peru produces another 10% of the copper. And the rest of the Americas, that's US, Canada, Mexico, produce roughly …”

“The largest producer of copper in the world is, there's a tie. So last year there was a change in the ranking. It was usually was Codelco, which is a state-owned company, a Chilean state-owned company. Codelco was the largest producer of copper, and last year …”

“So Escondida, which is the largest copper mine in the world, produces all by itself a million tons of copper, a little bit more than one million ton of copper tons per year. That is roughly all the production of the U.S. Just produced by one asset.”

“So roughly China consumes 12 to 15 to thirteen million tons of copper per year. The U.S. Around one point into two million tons. And then Germany, Japan, and developed nations consume roughly a million tons per year.”

“Roughly 50, between 45, 55% of the smelting capacity in the world, so companies that purchase the concentrate and smelt it, are in China.”

“Today, about 80% of the copper is produced through concentration, because it comes from copper sulfides, and only 20% comes from copper oxides, and those are processes through hydrometallurgy.”

“The amount of copper that will be required in the next 30 year shale is roughly the amount of copper that humanity has produced all over history.”

“So Copper starts cutting checks from all the money they're making, that Dodson is making. Copper starts cutting checks to Leah Fastow, Andy's wife.”

“They said they had to be electric cars, but electric cars are two and a half times more copper.”

“Well, I think that even with what we said, wildly optimistic assumptions, you don't get there, and if you continue at the rate we are in terms of mine development, efficiency of mines, and recycling, you end up with quite a big shortage, which would be a real …”

“We're back to China, where 42% of world copper is smelted.”

“It's an order hundred billion dollar market.”

“An EV, as you probably know, requires about three X copper, three X mass of copper, than an equivalent internal combustion car.”

“By our estimates, We need roughly five trillion dollars of new discoveries of copper, and this is, I mean, we'll come back to the, what I mean by discovery, well, let's keep going but new discoveries of copper just to fully electrify the light duty vehicle fle…”

“The new discoveries, about three trillion, or maybe four trillion, as opposed to five trillion. So it's actually on the same order, like the market opportunity for new lithium discoveries is about the same order of that as copper”