Copper traded at an all-time high of $6.44 a pound on Tuesday, lifted by a supply squeeze, the Iran war and a rush to stockpile the metal. The jump pushed major miners higher too, with BHP rising 25% over the past six weeks and Rio Tinto also hitting a record earlier in the day.
BHP reached A$60.23 ($43.36) earlier today, while Rio Tinto touched A$185.50, underscoring how quickly the copper price rally has fed into mining stocks. BHP is up 56% over the past 12 months, and the move has come as investors bet that tight supply will keep the market short of metal even with inventories reported at an all-time high.
The latest surge comes after a string of supply hits that have made copper harder to source just as demand keeps climbing. Construction, electronics and transport are all pulling more of the metal into use, while stockpiling has added another layer of pressure. The U.S. is also storing copper under Project Vault, and Morgan Stanley said last month that American inventories were increasingly being treated by the market as a strategic reserve.
One of the biggest supply questions remains Indonesia’s Grasberg mine, a giant operation that has been producing at about 45% of capacity since a catastrophic mudslide in September last year killed seven workers and blocked the mine. Before the outage, Grasberg was producing 1.7 billion pounds of copper a year. Since then, output has been reduced to around 700,000 pounds, and a report last week said the mine might miss its previously announced full-scale restart date by 12 months, slipping from early 2027 to early 2028.
Freeport McMoRan said it was sticking with the early 2027 restart deadline for Grasberg, a reminder that the market is still weighing company guidance against the physical damage on the ground. That uncertainty matters because Grasberg is only one part of a broader squeeze that also includes the closure of the Cobre Panama mine in Panama and an outage at the Kamoa Kakula mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The pressure has been reinforced by the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which is limiting supplies of oil and sulfuric acid, a key input in some copper refining processes. Dominic Barton said last week at Rio Tinto’s annual meeting in Perth that rising geopolitical tensions were adding to demand for minerals and metals, a view that fits the mood of a market where fear of shortages is feeding buying. The unusual part is that global inventories are also at an all-time high at the same time as the copper price is at a record, a combination that suggests traders are treating the metal less like an industrial commodity and more like a strategic asset.
For now, the market is behaving as if the shortage story matters more than the stockpiles. If Grasberg slips again, or if the war-driven squeeze on inputs deepens, copper’s record may not hold for long.
