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Charles Pitts is the publisher of Skillings Mining Review, the trade journal that has covered mining since 1912. He writes on the macro forces behind metal prices: commodity cycles, sovereign capital and the shifting sources of demand. His current work argues that hyperscale AI, and the gigawatt-scale power its data centres need, is becoming a buyer of lithium and copper in its own right, competing with the automotive supply chain for tier-one reserves.
Copper’s rally has reached a policy-driven inflection point. The metal climbed to a record near $14,854 per tonne on Sept. 9, according to Bloomberg and TradingKey,…
Sudan’s artisanal gold sector is a major source of revenue for the forces fighting the country’s war. Switzerland has begun banning purchases, imports and transit of…
Diamond drilling at a copper-gold exploration site in British Columbia. Kodiak Copper Corp. reported its strongest-ever drill intersection at the Ketchan zone of the MPD copper-gold…
China’s lithium carbonate market has settled into a narrow range as seasonal purchasing from battery and cathode producers meets a steady recovery in domestic output and…
St Barbara has agreed to sell its remaining interest in the New Simberi Gold Project and associated Tabar Islands exploration licences in Papua New Guinea to…
Furnaces and conveyors inside a ferronickel processing plant. The European Commission is preparing to issue a statement of objections to MMG’s proposed acquisition of Anglo American’s…
Drilling at the Boumadine project in Morocco’s Anti-Atlas region. Aya Gold & Silver has more than doubled the after-tax net present value of its Boumadine project…
Dense rainforest surrounds the legacy Panguna copper mine site on Bougainville. Armed men attacked and set fire to a project camp at the Panguna copper mine…
Gold edged lower toward $4,340 an ounce on Monday as hotter-than-expected U.S. inflation data strengthened expectations that the Federal Reserve could raise interest rates this week,…
Gold processing infrastructure at a modern mine site. Gold and silver prices fell sharply Thursday after a hotter U.S. producer-price report and a surge in oil…
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