Robert Friedland

In early September 2026, Robert Friedland did what he has done for four decades: he made the market look at a map of the Democratic Republic of Congo and see the future of copper. Ivanhoe Mines had just lifted the mineral-resource estimate at its Western Forelands / Makoko discovery by about 30 per cent, to roughly 12 million tonnes of contained copper. Then Friedland said the quiet part out loud. Silicon Valley "hyperscalers," he told Bloomberg, were now in conversation about offtake and even mine financing. "We're seeing unconventional interest in mining that I never saw in my 45 years in mining."

The line was classic Friedland, theatrical, slightly outrageous, and uncomfortably close to the truth. Data centres, electrification and reindustrialisation are colliding with a copper market that cannot add mines at the speed of AI capex. The same man who once sold Voisey's Bay and midwifed Oyu Tolgoi was now arguing that the metal needed to "green the world" is competing with national-security demand, and that some of the next tonnes may have to come from the Central African Copperbelt rather than from PowerPoint slides in Arizona or Queensland. Critics hear a promoter working a story. Supporters hear the rare explorer who has already built one of the world's most important new copper complexes and is pointing at the next one before the rest of the industry has finished arguing about permitting.