Asia's older copper buyers pay as AI bids in their market

Japan, India and Korea carry the cost in prices and margins.

Huang's layers sit on the same copper market

Jensen Huang's five layers of artificial intelligence rest on energy, and the copper is laid in at the bottom: in the lines, transformers and switchgear that carry power to the site, and in the busbars and cable inside it.^1,2 Beneath his foundation runs one more layer that the diagram leaves out, the copper market itself, and an Indian air-conditioner maker draws on it at the same exchange price as a data-centre builder in America.

That shared layer is where the AI build presses on everyone else. At the LME's metals seminar in October, Trafigura's Graeme Train said traditional uses such as construction, cars and white goods had added almost nothing to copper demand growth over five years, while new uses supplied all of it.³ Indian air-conditioner makers have raised prices this year citing copper, and Korean equipment suppliers on fixed-price contracts are struggling to pass the cost on.⁴ The new buyer is bidding in the old market. Whether it adds to Asia's copper tonnes or takes them from the buyers already there is the question this piece follows.

Key players

No.	Participant	Role
1	Nvidia (Jensen Huang)	Chief executive whose five-layer picture of AI opens the piece
2	Trafigura (Graeme Train)	Commodity trader's analyst; argued at the LME seminar that new uses supply all copper demand growth
3	Roseville Electric Utility	Californian city utility buying transformers years ahead
4	Hyosung Heavy Industries	Korean transformer maker supplying US AI data centres
5	HD Hyundai Electric and LS ELECTRIC	Korean power-equipment makers with large North American order books
6	Voltas, Daikin, Blue Star and LG	Air-conditioner sellers in India that raised prices citing copper
7	Pan Pacific Copper	Japan's largest copper smelter; set a record premium for 2026
8	JX Advanced Metals	Sets Japan's monthly copper base price
9	Japan Electric Wire and Cable Makers' Association (JCMA)	Publishes Japan's wire shipments in tonnes of copper and in yen
10	International Copper Association India	Estimates India's copper use by sector
11	APAR Industries	Indian maker of copper and aluminium conductors
12	LS Cable	Korean cable maker paid through escalation clauses
13	Comex (CME Group)	US exchange whose warehouses hold a record copper stock

The participants sit at different points between the money and the metal: the makers report sales and orders, the utilities and appliance makers pay, and none of them reports where the copper inside the new orders is bought.

Data centres join the utilities' queue

Dan Beans runs Roseville Electric Utility in California. He now orders equipment five years before his projects need it.⁵

The machine he waits for longest is the transformer, and it is old. Engineers at the Ganz works in Budapest made it practical in the 1880s: copper coils wound round an iron core.⁶ A large one now takes more than three years to reach an American utility.⁵ A city utility is the oldest customer that machine has. Somewhere ahead of it in the queue stands the newest.

That customer is ordering from Korea, where more than half the orders at the three big power-equipment makers are now for North America, where old grids and new data centres are both buying. Hyosung Heavy Industries will ship transformers rated at 765kV, the highest voltage on America's grid, to two technology companies building AI data centres.⁷

A transformer's working life runs between three lines: the production line that builds it, the queue of buyers waiting for a slot on that line, and the power line it will feed. The middle one is the second floor of the shared layer under Huang's foundation, and there the new buyer and the old meet before either has bought a tonne of copper. Asia's own trade shows the same overlap: Japan's wire makers expect to ship more cable into power equipment and credit AI's hunger for power, and India's grid took markedly more transformer capacity last year while data centres barely register.^8,9

Those older buyers now face one question. What will it cost to keep their place?

Old buyers pay in price or in margin

Copper's rise reaches an old buyer in one of two places: the price it charges, or the margin it keeps.

India's air-conditioner makers chose the price. Voltas, Daikin, Blue Star and LG raised theirs this year, citing dearer copper and a weak rupee, and buyers have so far kept paying, helped by a cut in the tax on the machines.¹⁰ Blue Star plans more capacity for demand in smaller cities. Its managing director has also warned that buyers may spend less if prices rise again.¹¹

Korea's small suppliers had no such choice. Makers of switchboards and ship equipment on fixed-price contracts are struggling to pass copper's rise on, while the country's large cable makers, paid through clauses that move with the metal, are growing.¹² The cost of the metal has moved down the chain to the firms least able to bear it.

A third way out is to leave the metal. Copper now costs more than four times as much as aluminium, past the point where redesign pays, and Indian appliance makers are reviewing motor windings and condenser coils for the cheaper metal.¹³

The national counts, which run to March, still show copper fabrication rising in Japan and copper use in India.^14,9 The old buyers are squeezed and starting to switch, and the squeeze is so far a matter of money, which is exactly what Japan's wire makers have been counting.

Japan's wire makers ship the same copper at a higher price

Between a mine and a buyer's balance sheet, a tonne of copper is weighed and priced many times. Pan Pacific Copper, Japan's largest smelter, weighs the concentrate that arrives by ship and prices the refined metal it sells, and for this year it asked its domestic customers for a premium of $330 a tonne over the exchange price, more than three times last year's.¹⁵ The wire makers weigh that metal into their furnaces and price their cable off JX Advanced Metals' monthly base price, which rose by three-fifths in the year to August.¹⁶ Each handover leaves two marks in the record: how much metal changed hands, and what it cost.

In August Japan's wire and cable makers shipped almost exactly as much copper as a year before, and were paid a quarter more for it.¹⁷ Their association has watched the weight fall over six years, from 694,000 tonnes a year to 583,000, and now expects the fall to stop, crediting power demand from AI for steady orders of the cable that goes into transformers and switchgear.⁸

That steadiness is what the association expects AI-linked power demand to support in Japan's tonnes. The extra yen came from every buyer the association counts, from utilities and builders to carmakers and machinery makers, whose cable bills rose with the metal.

India's grid pays twice

India's new grid is going into the ground. A 2023 tender for the salt flats at Khavda, in Gujarat, specified 820 kilometres of aluminium collector cable for one vast solar-park block,¹⁸ and across the country solar additions doubled in the year to March.⁹ The International Copper Association counted 2,100 kt of copper used in India in the year to March, 12% more than the year before, and its published shares put about half of the increase into the grid: solar parks, wind farms and a fifth more transformer capacity.⁹ Data centres took under one per cent. At APAR's conductor division, fewer tonnes left the gates in April to June and revenue still rose by a fifth, on higher prices and a richer mix.¹⁹ India's utilities ordered more transformer capacity in the year to March. The capacity count and the later price rise are separate records, but the grid is exposed to both.

Korea counts its copper in won

Korean cable makers commonly write an escalation clause into their contracts: a few lines that tie the price of the cable to the price of the copper inside it.¹² Those lines decide how the metal's rise reaches a Korean buyer, and they are almost the only place the metal appears. We could find no national count of the copper Korea's makers use.

Korea's producer price index tracks wire and cable instead, and that rose by a fifth in the year to April, as the clauses did their work.¹² LS Cable's revenue rose 12% last year and its operating profit 2%, as they would if the dearer metal flowed through its accounts and out to its customers. Korea's three big power-equipment makers held more than 27tn won of orders at the start of the year, over half of it for North America.⁷ Those orders are the clearest trace of the new buyer we found anywhere in Asia, and they carry no weight of copper at all.

Behind all three countries stands the proverbial elephant in the room. America's largest technology companies are expected to spend about $750bn on capital this year, much of it on data centres.²⁰ America imported almost 885,000 tonnes of refined copper in the first half of the year, and by late August the copper in Comex warehouses there had reached a record 675,000 tonnes.²¹

Some of that metal will end up in data centres; much of it was pulled in by traders ahead of a decision on tariffs. Wherever it ends up, it has left the pool that Japanese, Indian and Korean buyers draw on, and China's own appetite, for its grid and its data centres, leaves little to fill the gap.^21,22

That is how a data centre that barely registers in India's count still reaches an Indian utility's invoice. The new buyer's copper is being bought on the other side of the Pacific, and Asia's old buyers are paying for its absence.

Evidence and limits

Japan's figures are JCMA shipments in tonnes of copper content and yen; per-tonne changes are GEB arithmetic, and the copper base price is a pure-metal reference, not a share of the wire's value. India's shares are rounded estimates by a copper industry association, and its national count runs to March 2026, before most of this year's price rises. We found no national count of Korea's copper use. Order values, the American import and stock figures and company statements are as reported by the companies or the press, read in English and Korean. The seminar quotation is from GEB's transcript of the session, attributed to Graeme Train as reported by Fastmarkets. Much of the American stock build was tariff-driven, and no source measures how much of it will reach data centres.

Notes

1. Jensen Huang, "AI Is a 5-Layer Cake", Nvidia blog, 10 March 2026: energy, chips, infrastructure, models, applications ("At the foundation is energy"). First described at Davos, Nvidia write-up of 21 January 2026. Source 1
2. Where the copper sits: Linesight, "Copper volatility and APAC data centres", 28 July 2026 (cooling and electrical infrastructure more than 80% of in-facility copper); Wood Mackenzie, June 2026, on grid-side metals; Nvidia's NVL72 rack, linked by 5,184 copper cables. Source 1
3. LME metals seminar, London, 19 October 2026, copper session, from GEB's transcript; speaker identified as Graeme Train, head of metals and minerals analysis at Trafigura, from Fastmarkets' report of 20 October 2026. Source 1
4. Outlook Money, 9 March 2026, on air-conditioner price rises; Hankyung (Cho Cheol-o), 31 May 2026, read in Korean, on suppliers tied to fixed-price contracts. Source 1
5. Reuters (Kavya Balaraman) via Kitco, 9 July 2026: Roseville Electric Utility's five-year purchasing; large substation transformer waits past three years. Source 1
6. The closed-core transformer of Zipernowsky, Bláthy and Déri at the Ganz works, Budapest, 1884 to 1885.
7. Asia Economy, 3 February 2026: combined order backlog of HD Hyundai Electric, Hyosung Heavy Industries and LS ELECTRIC above 27tn won, more than half for North America; Hyosung Heavy Industries release, 15 September 2026, on 765kV and 345kV transformers for two US technology companies. Source 1
8. JCMA, revised FY2026 demand outlook, 18 September 2026: 694.2 kt in FY2019, 583.3 kt in FY2025, 587 kt forecast for FY2026; page 2 on AI-driven power demand and heavy electrical equipment. Source 1
9. International Copper Association India, India's copper demand in FY2026, October 2026: 2,100 kt, up 12%; infrastructure's share of the increase is GEB arithmetic from rounded published shares; transformers up 19%; solar additions doubled. Machine Maker, 22 October 2026, reporting the ICA release: data centres under 1%. ICA report: Machine Maker report: Source 1 Source 2
10. Outlook Money, 9 March 2026: room air-conditioner prices up by as much as 15%, citing copper and a weak rupee; GST on air conditioners cut from 28% to 18%. Source 1
11. Free Press Journal, 7 April 2026, on Blue Star's capacity and demand in smaller cities; Whalesbook, May 2026, on the managing director's warning. Source 1
12. Hankyung (Cho Cheol-o), 31 May 2026, read in Korean: wire and cable producer price index 197.27 (April 2025) to 237.44 (April 2026), up 20.4% (KOSIS); escalation clauses; LS Cable 2025 revenue ₩7,588.2bn, up 12.2%, operating profit ₩279.8bn, up 1.9%; small switchboard, contractor and shipbuilding suppliers on fixed-price contracts. Source 1
13. Copper to aluminium price ratio: Hankyung, 7 January 2026 (4.2); Mysteel, 26 June 2026 (4.43, substitution early-stage); UBS via Forbes Japan, 10 July 2026 (viable above 3.5). Indian appliance makers: AL Circle, 5 September 2026. Source 1
14. Japan Copper Drawing Association, preliminary FY2025 data, via BigMint, 30 April 2026: downstream fabrication up 4%. Source 1
15. SMM, 9 January 2026: Pan Pacific Copper's proposed 2026 premium "as high as $330 per mt", against $88 in 2025. Source 1
16. JX Advanced Metals, monthly average domestic copper base price: ¥1,481,000 a tonne in August 2025, ¥2,359,400 in August 2026. Source 1
17. JCMA, copper wire shipments, August 2026, released 20 October 2026: 40,684 t of copper content, down 0.1%; ¥156,029m, up 26.0%; seven product rows (Figure 1). Source 1
18. NTPC Renewable Energy, Khavda solar park collector cable tender, corrigendum of 28 June 2023, for the 1,255 MW block. Source 1
19. APAR Industries, Q1 FY27 earnings call update, 24 July 2026, conductor division: volume down about 7%, revenue up about 20%. Source 1
20. Kpler, "Copper: the perfect squeeze", 17 July 2026: about $725bn to $750bn of 2026 capital spending by the largest cloud and platform companies. Source 1
21. Reuters (Tom Daly) via Kitco, 25 August 2026: US imports of almost 885,000 t of refined cathode in the first half of 2026; Comex stocks a record 675,185 t; Bank of China International on China's "limited capacity to offset shortages elsewhere". Source 1
22. Mysteel, 18 June 2026: copper consumption of China's data centres and computing centres about 127,300 t in 2025; China's power-grid investment up 32.4% in January to April 2026. Source 1