Copper Sits Within 1% of Its September Record. A Hunger Strike at One Chilean Mine Helps Explain Why.

Copper closed at $6.66 a pound on COMEX Friday, up 2.3% on the day and sitting about 1% below the all-time high of $6.739 it touched in September. The move came as a labor dispute at one of Chile's largest copper mines stretched into its third day, with some workers refusing food in protest. US markets are shut Monday for Columbus Day, so Friday's numbers are the freshest copper traders have to work with heading into the new week.

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What Changed

Workers at Antofagasta's Centinela mine, one of the company's largest Chilean operations, have been on strike since earlier in the week, and by Friday some had escalated to a hunger strike. Antofagasta has not changed its full-year production guidance, but the union representing the workers warns output could drop by as much as half in November if the dispute isn't resolved. Chile supplies roughly a quarter of the world's mined copper, so even a localized stoppage there tends to move global prices.

China added to the tightness from the demand side. Inventories stayed thin after a weeklong national holiday, and a gauge of import demand climbed to its highest level in four years as buyers appeared to restock. LME copper settled at $14,540 a ton Friday, up 1.6% on the day and about 2% for the week, putting it within roughly 1% of its own September record of $14,728. LME warehouse stocks, meanwhile, fell to a six-week low.

Why It Matters

The supply problem runs deeper than one strike. Codelco, the Chilean state miner and the world's largest copper producer, reported a 27% year-on-year drop in output at El Teniente, its flagship mine, through the first five months of 2026. The company's total 2025 production of 1.31 million tonnes was its lowest in nearly three decades, down 19% from the 1.62 million tonnes it produced in 2021. A 2025 rockburst at El Teniente that killed six workers forced a temporary shutdown, and in August regulators suspended an expansion project at the mine's Andes Norte section after geologists flagged seismic risk at depth. Codelco's own chairman has said the company's target of reaching 1.7 million tonnes by 2030 is no longer realistic. Chile's government responded that same month by letting Codelco keep all of its 2025 profits, about $2.4 billion, up from the roughly 30% it was allowed to retain before, to help fund a turnaround.

On the demand side, the AI buildout is adding a fast-growing claim on a metal that was already tight. JPMorgan estimated earlier this year that data centers could consume 475,000 tons of copper in 2026, more than four times the 110,000 tons they used in 2025. BHP expects that figure to keep climbing for decades, reaching roughly 3 million tons a year by 2050 as the industry wires up new facilities for power distribution and cooling. The same AI infrastructure race has already strained the power grids that feed it, and copper is shaping up as a second bottleneck behind electricity itself.

Longer-term forecasts point the same direction. S&P Global expects global copper demand to climb from about 28 million tons in 2025 to 42 million tons by 2040, implying a shortfall of roughly 10 million tons a year without a wave of new mine supply that hasn't been announced yet. The International Energy Agency separately projects a deficit equal to 25% of demand by 2035 based on currently committed mining projects alone.

Not everyone is convinced the move is built on solid ground. Earlier this year, when copper spiked 10% in a single session, StoneX's Natalie Scott-Gray called the broader rally unsustainable and described speculative positioning as overdone relative to the market's actual tightness. Panmure Liberum's Tom Price made a related point, noting that steel, which faces some of the same tariff pressures, hadn't moved anywhere near as much. Copper futures have a long history of overshooting the physical market in both directions, and this cycle may be no exception.

Some of the tightness Pulse24 flagged in COMEX stockpiles earlier this year has started to unwind. Record COMEX inventories had built up as traders rushed metal into the US ahead of a tariff decision that still hasn't landed, and the drop in LME warehouse stocks to a six-week low suggests at least some of that stockpiled metal is now moving back into actual use rather than sitting in a bonded warehouse.

What to Watch Next

The Centinela strike is the most immediate thing to track. A fast resolution would likely take some pressure off prices. A drawn-out one, especially if the union's 50% output estimate for November holds up, could push copper through its September record rather than just toward it. Chile's broader output trajectory matters just as much: the Andes Norte suspension and El Teniente's seismic constraints suggest the country's mined supply may keep shrinking even as global demand keeps growing, a mismatch that won't resolve on any single earnings call or union vote.

Watch the AI capital spending numbers too. Companies building new data centers rarely mention copper by name, but every multi-billion-dollar compute announcement implies another slice of grid wiring, transformers and cooling infrastructure that has to be built with it. Recent nuclear power deals signed to supply those data centers are being justified on similar buildout math, and copper demand tends to track the same curve as the power commitments behind it.

The Pulse24 Take

Copper's climb back toward its September highs isn't really one story. It's a labor dispute at a single Chilean mine landing on top of a structural decline in the country's broader output, arriving at the same moment an unrelated AI investment boom is quietly building a second, fast-growing source of demand that barely existed in forecasts three years ago. Either piece alone might only move the price for a session. Together, they help explain why analysts calling this rally overdone have kept being wrong for most of the year. That won't necessarily hold. A quick end to the Centinela strike, a China restocking cycle that fades as fast as it started, or a slowdown in AI capital spending could all take some air out of the price just as quickly. For now, the metal is trading like a market that expects the next surprise to come from supply, not demand.