Lumber and cement get the tariff headlines. Copper is the metal quietly rewriting electrical budgets. Prices pushed past $14,500 per metric ton in 2026, and Citigroup is forecasting $15,000 within a year. The producer price index for copper products jumped nearly 25% in a single year to a record.
The driver isn’t hard to find. A single 1-gigawatt AI data center needs roughly 50,000 metric tons of copper. J.P. Morgan estimates data centers alone could pull around 475,000 metric tons of demand in 2026, and that’s before the grid upgrades feeding them. The world is running a structural copper deficit while AI, EVs, and renewables all fight for the same pounds.
It’s not just wire
Contractors who think of copper as a wire line item are underestimating the exposure. It shows up in conduit, transformers, switchgear, busway, controls, and every utility interconnection. Copper electric wire alone rose almost 8% in a single quarter. On an electrical-heavy scope, a 25% jump in the base metal moves the whole bid.
The projects feeling it first
The buildings driving the demand are the ones getting squeezed. A campus like Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana runs on copper at every scale, from the busway inside the halls to the transmission lines outside the fence. The external power infrastructure may actually consume more copper than the servers do.
For estimators, the lesson is to stop treating copper as a stable input. Price it late, escalate it, and watch the electrical scope the way steel and concrete used to get watched. Gordian’s running copper index is a useful gauge of where the number sits week to week.