I saw recently that the biggest tech companies are planning on investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence and building massive data centres to help them get there. It’s a wake up call for copper of course.
Just recently Meta—home of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsAp—said it would construct a multi gigawatt data centre nearly the size of Manhattan, while artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI is currently putting the finishing touches on a $60B data centre in Texas it says is bigger than New York’s Central Park.
They will also require vast amounts of energy (& copper). For example, in 2022 US data centres consumed 17GW of energy, but by the end of the decade they will need 35GW, or almost half of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030.
Globally the International Energy Agency projects that electricity demand from data centres is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today.
Australia is no exception. After something of a slow start we now have something like 300 data centres—and an “AI Factory” by NEXTDC in Sydney soon—and expect the capacity to double by, yep, 2030. Morgan Stanley says by then they’ll be using 8% of Australia’s power grid.
Even a decade ago these figures would’ve seemed like science fiction. Back then it was Clean Energy that dominated concerns about how the world could supply enough copper for us all to hit Net Zero. That’s still in play, but its now in a tough competition with global “compute power” which needs copper for everything from the chips and busbars to power connectors to transmission cables.
Doom scrolling copper supply will soon show you that there are no end of reports, roadmaps, articles and podcasts warning of a major chasm between what our current or near future mines can produce and what the world needs. BHP chief executive officer, Mike Henry, summed it nicely though—“Over the next 20 years the world is going to need up to 70% more copper.”
How Australia navigates this unprecedented demand in a world rapidly redefining supply chains remans to be seen, but with vast copper resources, an innovative industry and a pro-active public sector 2030 shouldn’t look too scary.
Cheers, John Fennell