Metals Turn "Green": Why the Copper and Gold Selloff Is an AI Story

The precious metals and industrial commodities market decided to attempt a "high dive" right after setting new all-time highs. Gold, silver and especially copper suddenly turned red on trading terminals, though Chinese analysts wryly call it the metals turning "green" (in Chinese tradition, green often symbolizes falling prices). What do artificial intelligence and our publication have to do with it? The link is direct, hard and physically tangible.

Over the past months we have watched a frenzied rally. Gold rose on geopolitical risks, while copper rose on expectations of endless data center expansion. When OpenAI, Microsoft or Google plan clusters of a million GPUs, their budgets include not only the cost of Nvidia chips, but also kilometers of copper cabling and tons of aluminum for cooling systems. Higher prices for these resources directly inflate the capital expenditures (CAPEX) of tech giants.

What we are seeing now is classic overheating: the market simply could not sustain its own pace, and capital started looking for new niches. The price-rise chain of "gold-silver-copper-aluminum-oil-gas" has begun to falter. Gold first played the role of a safe-haven asset, then silver caught up on speculation, and copper became the final chord of this cycle.

A large-scale reshuffling of positions is under way. Big players are locking in profits, which opens a temporary window of opportunity for hardware makers. If copper holds at current levels, it may slightly slow the rise in prices of server equipment, which already costs as much as the budget of a small island nation.

For the AI industry these are not just numbers on an exchange, but a question of scalability. We are used to discussing transformer architectures and parameter counts in new models, but we often forget that AI is first and foremost physical infrastructure. Cheap copper means more affordable electricity and less costly construction of new server capacity.

However, there is no reason for euphoria. The current drop looks more like a technical correction ahead of a new surge than a long-term trend toward cheaper living. Demand for copper from the AI sector and "green" energy has not gone anywhere, and it keeps growing exponentially.

Chinese investors are now frozen in anticipation: should they buy this dip right now? In the tech sector context, the answer is more likely yes. We are in a phase where physical constraints, energy and materials, matter more than software innovation. Any pullback in commodity prices is a gift to companies like Nvidia, Vertiv or Schneider Electric, which provide the "skeleton" of the modern internet. If the price-rise chain breaks for good, we will see cloud computing prices stabilize, which is critical for startups living on grants and venture money.

It is interesting to watch capital "switch" positions. After copper took the baton from gold, the market entered a phase of turbulence. For us this means that the AI arms race is colliding with the reality of commodity markets. You cannot train GPT-5 on algorithms alone if you have no copper to power the servers. The current "price dive" is only a pause that lets the industry catch its breath before the next stage of data center expansion.

Bottom line: Copper is the new lithium, and its volatility directly affects the speed of the AI revolution. Will cloud providers manage to lock in favorable supply contracts before the market turns back?