Skillings Mining Intelligence: The $12.5B
The map of the world’s mineral dependencies is being redrawn, and for the first time in three decades, the West is actually picking up the pen.
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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.
The map of the world’s mineral dependencies is being redrawn, and for the first time in three decades, the West is actually picking up the pen.
The market is not “cycling.” It’s snapping into a new shape. We’re living through a resource realignment that’s structural, not sentimental. The old playbook, wait for…
The consensus was that gold had finally lost its luster. As bullion touched a 2026 low of $4,100, the narrative across trading desks was clear: the…
2026 isn't just another year on a commodity chart. It is the year the global copper market hits a wall that no amount of financial engineering…
The West is waking up to a reality it spent a decade trying to ignore: you cannot build a green future without a shovel. While Western…
The era of cheap, easy-to-access minerals ended while the market was looking at spreadsheets. Today, Sunday, March 22, 2026, we aren't just looking at price fluctuations:…
Lithium is the current punching bag of the mining industry. The narrative is predictable. Oversupply from 2024-2025 created a glut that crushed spot prices, sent junior…
The narrative that copper is just another cyclical commodity is officially dead. If you’re waiting for a massive correction to bring prices back to 2019 levels,…
The Silicon Valley dream of a weightless, purely digital economy died a quiet death this week. It was buried under several million tons of copper concentrate…
The nuclear renaissance has a massive problem: it is running out of fuel. While policy-makers spend their time debating reactor designs and grid stability, the actual…
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