Copper is the metal of electrification — every grid, motor, chip and data centre runs on it. Mining it is a global business; smelting it increasingly is not. This site tracks where copper is mined, smelted and refined, and how tariffs, disasters and record prices are rewiring the trade — using open data from USGS, ICSG, the IEA and BGS.
0copper mined worldwide, 2025 (USGS est.)
0of the world's refined copper made in China, 2025
0supply gap projected for 2035 (IEA base case)
0per tonne — LME all-time high, 29 Jan 2026
Interactive map
The copper world map
Major producing mines, smelters and refineries, disrupted operations and development projects. Tap a marker for details; toggle layers below. Circle size ≈ scale of operation.
Copper trades in a ladder of forms — from rock that is 99.4% waste to cathode that is 99.99% metal. Each rung is a different market with its own price, and the chokepoints sit between the rungs. Tap a stage.
From a gram of metal per kilogram of rock to the wire in an EV motor, copper passes through a chain where the geography narrows at every step — and the margins have moved downstream.
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Production & reserves
Where copper comes from
Mine production by country, 2025
Thousand metric tons of copper content, log scale (USGS estimates)
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026. World total ~23 Mt; 2025 figures are estimates.
Reserves by country
Million metric tons of copper (world total ~980 Mt)
Copper mining is spread across five continents — no country mines more than a quarter of it. The concentration comes one step later: China has built over 90% of the world's new smelting capacity since 2005 and now smelts about half of all copper. In 2026 the fee smelters charge miners hit $0 for the first time ever.
Smelting geography
Overcapacity in China, retreat almost everywhere else
🇨🇳The Chinese fleet
From ~15% of world smelting capacity in 2005 to ~50% today: Guixi (the world's largest smelter), the Tongling cluster, Daye, Jinchuan and dozens more — built faster than mines could feed them, and now competing for every tonne of concentrate on Earth.
📉The $0 fee
Treatment charges — what miners pay smelters to process concentrate — collapsed from a $80/t benchmark in 2024 to $21.25 in 2025 to $0 for 2026, with spot fees deeply negative. Smelters now survive on sulfuric acid and gold by-product credits; China's top smelters agreed to cut output over 10% in 2026.
🌍The new entrants
Resource-holders are forcing the value chain home: Indonesia's concentrate-export ban built Freeport's Manyar smelter (2024), Ivanhoe fired up Africa's largest smelter at Kamoa-Kakula (Dec 2025), Adani's Kutch plant anchors India's push, and Uzbekistan is expanding Almalyk.
⚠️The Western retreat
Outside China, custom smelting is an endangered business: Glencore mothballed the Philippines' PASAR refinery in 2025 and sought state support for Australia's Mount Isa smelter. The US is down to two primary smelters — which is why Washington now classes smelting capacity as a strategic asset.
Sources: IEA commentary on copper smelting (2026); ICSG; USGS MCS 2026; Reuters; company disclosures.
Refined production by country, 2025
Thousand tonnes of refined copper — the step where the market concentrates
Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (2025 estimates). World total ~29 Mt.
From ore to wire, step by step
Sulfide route (top), leach and scrap routes (bottom) converge at cathode. Scroll sideways on mobile →
Process shares: ICSG, USGS. SX-EW = solvent extraction–electrowinning, used for oxide and low-grade ores; new leach technologies aim to extend it to sulfides.
Demand
The wiring of everything
No other industrial metal touches as much of the economy. Copper demand was long a proxy for construction in China; it is now being re-based on power grids, EVs and — since 2024 — AI data centres, none of which can substitute away from it at scale.
⚡Power grids
The biggest growth market. The IEA expects some 80 million km of grid lines to be built or refurbished by 2040 — a copper order book measured in decades. Grid and line hardware already anchors the "electrical" share of demand everywhere.
🏗️Construction
Still the base load: building wire, plumbing and HVAC took 42% of US copper in 2025 (Copper Development Association via USGS). Every square metre of built space carries kilograms of copper behind the walls.
🚗Electric vehicles
A battery-electric car uses roughly 83 kg of copper against ~23 kg in a petrol car (S&P Global) — plus the charger, plus the grid upgrade behind the charger. Motors, busbars, harnesses and batteries all draw on it.
🖥️Data centres & AI
The demand shock nobody modelled in 2020: J.P. Morgan estimates a single large AI data centre can contain up to 50,000 t of copper — power distribution, busways, cooling — with the sector drawing roughly 400–600 kt a year through the late 2020s.
30%the copper supply gap the IEA projects for 2035: existing and announced mines would meet only ~70% of demand (Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025). S&P Global sees demand growing from ~28 Mt today to ~42 Mt by 2040.
Geopolitics
From commodity to critical mineral
For a century copper was the well-behaved commodity: liquid, global, boring. Between 2023 and 2026 a court ruling, three mine disasters, a tariff whipsaw and a smelting-fee collapse turned it into contested strategic territory.
Nov 2023
Panama switches off 1.5% of world supply
After weeks of mass protests, Panama's Supreme Court rules First Quantum's contract unconstitutional and Cobre Panamá — ~350,000 t/yr, about 5% of the country's GDP — is ordered shut. The biggest single copper supply loss in years, and a warning that permits can be revoked as fast as they are granted.
2024
The smelter glut builds
China keeps commissioning smelters as mine growth stalls; spot treatment charges begin sliding toward zero. New plants outside China — Freeport's Manyar in Indonesia (built under Jakarta's concentrate-export ban), Adani's Kutch in India — join the scramble for concentrate.
Feb 2025
Section 232
Washington opens a national-security investigation into copper imports. COMEX starts pricing a tariff premium over the LME, and the world's cathode begins sailing to America.
May 2025
Kamoa-Kakula floods
Seismic activity floods part of the Kakula mine in the DRC — the world's highest-grade major copper mine. Ivanhoe cuts 2025 guidance by roughly 150,000 t; dewatering and a rebuilt mine plan follow.
Jul 2025
The tariff whipsaw
Jul 8: Trump announces a 50% copper tariff; COMEX jumps 13% in a day — the biggest gain since 1968 — and trades at a ~24% premium to London. Jul 30: the proclamation exempts cathode, ores and scrap, applying 50% only to semi-finished products from Aug 1. COMEX crashes by about a fifth in a day. A phased refined-copper tariff — 15% in 2027, 30% in 2028 — is left on the table.
Jul 31 2025
El Teniente collapses
A seismic event collapses tunnels at Codelco's El Teniente, the world's largest underground copper mine, killing six workers. 2025 output falls 13% to ~310,000 t, the Andes Norte expansion is suspended, and Codelco posts its lowest production in almost three decades.
Sep 2025
Black September
Sep 8: a mud rush inundates Grasberg's Block Cave in Indonesia — the world's No. 2 copper mine — killing seven. Freeport declares force majeure; ~35% of planned 2026 output is lost and full capacity recedes to early 2028. The next day, Anglo American and Teck announce a $53B merger of equals to form Anglo Teck. In one month, copper loses ~3% of near-term mine supply and gains a new top-five producer.
Nov–Dec 2025
Critical mineral, zero fee
Nov 7: copper is added to the US critical minerals list for the first time. December: Chinese smelters settle the 2026 concentrate benchmark at $0/t (vs $21.25 in 2025) — the lowest ever — and China's top smelters agree to cut 2026 output by more than 10%. Kamoa-Kakula's on-site smelter, Africa's largest, fires up.
Jan 2026
The record
Jan 29: LME three-month copper spikes to an all-time high of $14,527.50/t in a Shanghai-led surge — the biggest daily move since 2008 — before closing lower. The era of $9,000 copper looks over.
Apr–Aug 2026
Squeeze and stalemate
Panama authorises First Quantum to export stockpiled concentrate (30,000–40,000 t of copper in 2026) while restart talks over ownership and taxes drag on; a June audit finds the mine broadly compliant. Grasberg begins its phased underground restart. Aug 7: COMEX prints a record $6.77/lb; LME spreads hit their widest backwardation since January as US-bound metal drains exchange warehouses. Washington's decision on the refined-copper tariff is still pending.
Sources: USGS MCS 2026; Congressional Research Service (IN12614); company disclosures (Freeport-McMoRan, Codelco, Ivanhoe, First Quantum, Anglo American/Teck); Reuters, Bloomberg, MINING.com, Fastmarkets.
Trade & prices
Who ships to whom — and at what price
The US mines a million tonnes a year yet became the story of the 2025–26 copper market: tariff front-running pulled in a record 1.7 Mt of refined imports, lifted net import reliance from 45% to 57%, and left almost half a million tonnes sitting in American warehouses while the rest of the world tightened.
US refined-copper import sources
Average shares 2021–2024 — the Americas supply nearly all of it, which is why the cathode tariff was shelved
Source: USGS MCS 2026. Refined copper is 88% of US unmanufactured copper imports.
Benchmark prices, 2021–2025
Annual average $/lb — New York (COMEX) decoupled from London (LME) the moment tariffs entered the picture
Source: USGS MCS 2026 (annual averages). 2026 spot: LME record $14,527.50/t (Jan 29); COMEX record $6.77/lb (Aug 7).
A two-price world
What the 2025–26 tariff arbitrage did to a single global market
The premium
New York traded up to ~24% above London in July 2025 as traders raced cathode to the US ahead of tariffs — then the cathode exemption erased the gap in a day, the largest one-day fall on record.
The stockpile
US yearend refined stocks hit ~450,000 t in 2025 — nearly four times the year before — while LME warehouses drained, flipping London into its steepest backwardation since 2021.
The reliance
Chile alone supplies 68% of US refined imports. The proposed 2027–28 refined tariff would tax the very supply chain the US grid buildout depends on — one reason it keeps being deferred.
The exchanges
Three benchmarks now price copper — LME, COMEX and Shanghai — and the spreads between them have become the market's real story, driving metal across oceans in pursuit of a paper premium.
The world's No. 2 producer barely refines a sheet of its own copper into wire
The Democratic Republic of the Congo overtook Peru in 2023 and mined ~3.2 Mt in 2025 — more than tripling in a decade on the back of Kamoa-Kakula (Ivanhoe/Zijin) and CMOC's Tenke Fungurume and Kisanfu. The large majority of that output is Chinese-owned or Chinese-financed and ships east. Washington's counter-move is infrastructure: the US-backed Lobito rail corridor to the Atlantic, and a 2025 US–DRC minerals agreement. Ivanhoe's new on-site smelter — Africa's largest — is the first serious attempt to keep the value added at home.
~3.2 MtDRC mine production in 2025 (USGS est.) — 14% of world supply, up from ~1 Mt in 2015. Copper has made it Africa's largest copper producer and the fastest-growing source of new supply anywhere.
Sources: USGS MCS 2026; BGS; company disclosures; press reports.
Concentration risk
The China chokepoint
China mines 8% of the world's copper — and processes about half of it. Unlike rare earths, the dominance isn't geological; it was built, smelter by smelter, in two decades. Concentration now deepens at every step from the mine to the wire.
48%
of the world's refined copper was produced in China in 2025 (USGS). Its estimated share along the mine-to-wire chain:
Sources: USGS MCS 2026 (mining, refining, 2025); IEA copper commentary 2026 (smelting capacity ~50%); ICSG / SMM (refined consumption ~56%, 2025). Chinese companies also own or finance the majority of DRC output.
Dual use
Copper as a military material
Every round fired, every ship launched and every radar switched on consumes copper. The rearmament wave since 2022 has collided with electrification demand — and unlike most critical minerals, the US keeps no government stockpile of it.
🔫Ammunition
Cartridge brass is ~70% copper; artillery shells ride on copper driving bands. The scramble to multiply 155 mm shell production in the US and Europe has made ammunition plants competing buyers for the same rod and strip as the grid.
💥Precision munitions
Shaped-charge warheads — from Javelins to artillery submunitions — use high-purity copper liners that form the penetrating jet. No practical substitute exists at the price.
🚢Ships & submarines
Copper-nickel alloys carry seawater through every naval vessel; propellers are copper-alloy castings; a warship contains hundreds of kilometres of copper cable. Electric-drive ships raise the intensity further.
✈️Aircraft, drones & EW
Wiring harnesses, electric actuators, motor windings in drones, radar and electronic-warfare systems — the electrification of the battlefield is, materially, a copper story.
📦No stockpile
The US National Defense Stockpile holds no copper (USGS, 2026) — the Pentagon has historically treated it as freely traded. China's State Reserve Bureau, by contrast, is widely reported to have been building reserves through 2025–26.
🏛️Now officially critical
Copper joined the US critical minerals list in November 2025 and the EU's strategic raw materials list in 2023 — unlocking permitting fast-tracks, Defense Production Act tools and trade measures on both sides of the Atlantic.
With discovery-to-production averaging seventeen years and ore grades falling, the industry has concluded it is cheaper to buy copper on the stock exchange than to find it in the ground. Four places capital is concentrating — presented as observation, not investment advice.
🤝Buying beats building
Anglo American and Teck's $53B merger — Anglo Teck, a top-five, ~1.2 Mt/yr producer — awaits Beijing's sign-off after BHP twice ran at Anglo in 2024. Nearly every major's strategy now leads with copper exposure, and the pool of acquirable pounds keeps shrinking.
🏗️The megaproject pipeline
Reko Diq (Pakistan), Resolution (Arizona), the BHP-Lundin Vicuña district (Argentina/Chile), Freeport's ~$7.5B El Abra expansion, Tía María (Peru): each multi-billion, none delivering meaningful tonnes before the late 2020s — the gap the IEA keeps warning about.
🧪The technology frontier
Sulfide leaching (Rio Tinto's Nuton, Jetti) aims to pull cathode from waste rock at existing mines; Taseko's Florence proved in-situ recovery in 2025; KoBold's AI exploration found Mingomba in Zambia. Incremental tonnes today — transformative if any of it scales.
⚠️The risks
ICSG still sees the refined market near balance into 2027 — the shortage thesis rests on demand forecasts. High prices invite aluminium substitution and scrap surges; tariff rules can whipsaw premiums overnight; and Panama, Peru, the DRC and Zambia all showed how fast resource nationalism can erase supply — or restore it.
This section describes where capital is flowing, based on public data. It is not financial advice.
Sources: company and government disclosures; ICSG forecasts; IEA GCMO 2025; Reuters; MINING.com.
Company tracker
The companies that move copper
Miners, smelter-refiners and developers across the chain. The top ten producers mine roughly half the world's copper; a different, more Chinese, top ten refines it. Filter by segment or search.
Company
Segment
Key assets
Status & recent signals
Company status reflects public disclosures as of August 2026. This is an observational tracker, not investment advice.
International Copper Study Group (ICSG) — World Copper Factbook, monthly supply-demand bulletins and the twice-yearly market forecasts used here for refined-balance and consumption context.
Prices — LME and COMEX annual averages via USGS MCS 2026; 2026 records from exchange data as reported by Bloomberg, Reuters and MINING.com.
Tariffs & policy — the August 2025 presidential proclamation on copper imports, analysed by the Congressional Research Service (IN12614); Federal Register 90 FR 50494 (2025 US critical minerals list).
Supply disruptions — company disclosures: Freeport-McMoRan (Grasberg force majeure and restart), Codelco (El Teniente), Ivanhoe Mines (Kamoa-Kakula and smelter), First Quantum and Panama government statements (Cobre Panamá).
Notes — mine and plant coordinates are approximate. Smelting, refining and consumption shares are USGS/ICSG/IEA estimates; treatment-charge levels are industry benchmarks reported by price agencies. Last data refresh: August 2026.
FAQ
Common questions
Is the world running out of copper?
No. USGS puts global reserves at 980 million tonnes, with identified and undiscovered resources above 5 billion tonnes. The squeeze is about pace, not endowment: average ore grades have fallen to roughly 0.6% copper, a new mine takes about 17 years from discovery to production, and the IEA projects that existing and announced mines will cover only about 70% of copper demand by 2035 — a 30% supply gap.
Which country produces the most copper?
Chile mined about 5.3 of the world's 23 million tonnes in 2025 — roughly 23% — ahead of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (3.2 Mt) and Peru (2.7 Mt), according to USGS estimates. But China dominates the next step: it produced about 48% of the world's refined copper in 2025 and consumes well over half of it.
Why is smelting the chokepoint if copper mining is so spread out?
Copper mining is geographically diverse, but China built over 90% of the growth in global smelting capacity since 2005 and now holds about half of it. That overcapacity, colliding with stalled mine supply, pushed the 2026 benchmark fee smelters charge miners to $0 per tonne — the lowest ever — with spot fees deeply negative. Outside China, custom smelters are closing or on state support, and the United States has only two primary copper smelters left.
What did the 2025 US copper tariffs do?
The July 2025 announcement of a 50% copper tariff sent New York futures up 13% in a day — the largest gain since 1968 — and pulled record volumes of cathode to the US. When the final proclamation exempted refined cathode and applied the 50% duty only to semi-finished products from 1 August 2025, COMEX crashed by about a fifth in a day. The US still imported a record 1.7 million tonnes of refined copper in 2025, net import reliance jumped from 45% to 57%, and a phased tariff on refined copper (15% in 2027, 30% in 2028) remains proposed.
What is copper used for?
Wiring the world: building construction (42% of US use), electrical and electronic products (23%) and transportation (18%) lead. Power grids are the biggest growth market, a battery-electric vehicle uses roughly 83 kg of copper versus 23 kg in a petrol car, and a single large AI data centre can contain up to 50,000 tonnes.
Why did copper prices hit records in 2026?
A run of 2025 supply shocks — the Grasberg mud rush, the El Teniente collapse and flooding at Kamoa-Kakula — collided with tariff-driven US stockpiling that drained exchange warehouses elsewhere, surging grid and AI demand, and smelting fees at zero. LME copper hit an all-time high of $14,527.50 per tonne on 29 January 2026, and COMEX printed a record $6.77 per pound on 7 August 2026.
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