HIVE Digital Technologies highlights copper supply issues amid $500B AI buildout

Everyone’s talking about how much electricity AI data centers consume. Fewer people are talking about what those data centers are physically made of. HIVE Digital Technologies wants to change that conversation. During TheStreet Roundtable, HIVE Executive Chairman Frank Holmes laid out a problem that should keep AI infrastructure planners up at night: a single gigawatt-scale data center consumes roughly 50,000 tons of copper. And there isn’t nearly enough of the stuff to go around. The metal bottleneck behind the AI boom The context here is Nvidia’s memorandum of understanding, signed on August 10, 2026, to mobilize over $500 billion for AI infrastructure projects alongside six major asset managers. That capital is earmarked for data centers, GPU clusters, and the physical backbone of the AI revolution. Capital, as Holmes pointed out, is the easy part. The hard part is the raw materials. Copper prices have climbed to $6.67 per pound by late August 2026, a 16% increase since the start of the year. That trajectory isn’t a blip. It’s the market pricing in a structural imbalance between how much copper the world produces and how much the AI buildout demands. Analysts from Wood Mackenzie...