The rapid growth of AI has prompted economists to warn global demand for power will significantly outstrip earlier estimates. Amid concerns over the long-term supply of critical materials such as copper, and tensions between renewable energy and fossil fuels, John Basquill examines how the next technological revolution will reshape global trade flows and demand for financing.
After years of promise, artificial intelligence (AI) has erupted into life. In the UK alone, the AI market is expected to grow from around US$21bn today to over US$1tn by 2035, according to research by the US International Trade Administration.
From text, code and image generation to robotics and automation, a technological leap in AI could prove transformative for the entire global economy, boosting labour productivity and efficiency in any sector reliant on manual tasks.
In the financial sector, the ability to collect and analyse vast amounts of data – and produce meaningful conclusions from it – is already in practice. Processes already active at numerous trade finance providers include making documents machine-readable, processing invoices for supply chain finance, and assessing company data to improve credit decisioning.
Commodity traders are racing to integrate AI into their operations, according to Vitol chief executive Russel Hardy.
Traders are seeking to boost efficiency and “create some kind of edge by having more analytical power available to you, minute by minute”, he told the FT Commodities Global Summit in Lausanne in April.
“I think we’re all trying to get to the moon first.”
These trends are already visible in global trade flows. A report published in May 2024 by HSBC Global Research finds that Taiwan’s exports of AI-related goods have “shot up” since early 2023. Much of these exports are to other economies involved in the electronics supply chain, such as Malaysia and Singapore, outpacing growth to slower-moving markets like Europe.
But these trends do not tell the full story. If AI’s potential is realised, there are issues on the horizon that may have caught experts off-guard.
AI requires a great deal of energy. According to Google, the cost of processing an AI request is around 10 times more than a regular search query, while training an AI model demands a huge amount of power and data capacity.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects demand for data centre services – which currently account for just over 1% of global electricity usage – to double within the next two years, driven in no small part by AI advancements.
This, HSBC’s report says, is likely to “strain power grids not equipped to deal with significant load growth”.
“Indeed, power grids around the world are facing increased vulnerabilities as they transition from fossil fuel systems to ones that distribute renewable electricity,” the bank says.
Adapting to this demand will also require significant infrastructure build-out, creating substantial additional demand for copper and other metals used in electrification.
Saad Rahim, chief economist at Trafigura, said at the FT Commodities event that AI and data centres could contribute an additional 1 million tonnes of copper demand, worsening a “4 to 5 million [tonne] deficit”.
“That’s not something that anyone has actually factored into a lot of the supply and balances,” he said.
Metals in short supply
The future of the metals market looks precarious.
The IEA notes that during 2023, prices of critical minerals fell sharply. Lithium dropped by 75%, while the prices of cobalt, nickel and graphite fell by between 30% and 45%, according to its Global Critical Minerals Outlook for 2024.
These price dips occurred despite demand growth remaining steady, driven instead by a strong increase in global supply, including from China – expected to provide 77% of rare earth metals by 2030 – as well as Indonesia and key markets in Africa.
This may sound like good news for longer-term security of supply. However, as the IEA says:
“Today’s well-supplied market may not be a good guide for the future, as demand for critical minerals continues to rise.”
In a scenario where national energy and climate goals are met, critical mineral demand is expected to triple by 2030 and quadruple by 2040, with copper representing “by far the largest increase”, it finds.
To close the “significant” gap between prospective supply and demand, the IEA estimates around US$800mn investment in mining will be required before 2040.
Yet modest metals prices “have provided a headwind for new investment”, with spending on mining lower in 2023 than the previous year. Exploration investment is lower now than a decade ago.
“Financing diversified critical mineral supply chains faces numerous challenges, such as cost inflation, long-term price uncertainty and limited value placed on diversification by consumers,” the agency says.
Rohitesh Dhawan, chief executive of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), says this dynamic “represents a once-in-a-generation change in the mineral intensity of the global economy”.
“There is a big task ahead not just for the mining industry, but investors, governments and other stakeholders too, for how to meet this demand while helping create a more safe, just and sustainable world,” he tells GTR.
“According to data from S&P, 127 new mines opened globally between 2002 and 2023 and took an average of 15.7 years after discovery to get to commercial production. This varied from six to 32 years. This shows that we will need to work differently in future to ensure that supply can be brought online quicker without lowering responsible standards of production.”
Dhawan says governments have a key role in accelerating the growth of mining while ensuring operators maintain high standards.
This “will need governments to be more proactive than the past, for example in helping resolve competing interests in or uses of land when it comes to the developments of new projects”, he says.
A shifting market
But the market needs to take action, too. For instance, A McKinsey report published last year suggests commodity traders could also provide pre-financing for new mines and help producers access international markets, and there are signs this is already happening.
Bloomberg reported in June that some traders that have traditionally focused on energy, such as Mercuria, are now strengthening their position in metals, for example by offering large-scale prefinancing facilities to mining companies.
It says Kazakh producer Eurasian Resources Group (ERG) has turned to the trading market to seek pre-payment of up to US$1bn in exchange for copper and aluminium offtake agreements, which could prove highly lucrative if prices rise as steeply as anticipated.
“This makes sense for traders,” says Walter Vollebregt, owner of commodity trading consultancy Vollebregt Advisory. “They are competing for a scarce supply of copper concentrates, and miners are playing hard to get.”
He tells GTR: “Interest rates are a lot higher now, and if mining companies in markets, like ERG in Kazakhstan, need to refinance bond issues or want an alternative source of funding, traders have the cash and are able to provide – with their banks – competitive pre-export finance loans against a steady export flow of material.
“They can easily do a billion-dollar prepayment deal these days, especially if their banks and the insurance market are sharing the performance risk.”
The IEA also recommends traders provide improved transparency on pricing and wider availability of hedging instruments, while McKinsey says larger market participants could deploy their strong financial position and market knowledge to boost price discovery and liquidity in key markets.
This is a more complex challenge, however.
The derivatives market for critical minerals – an important means of hedging exposure to price volatility and increasing liquidity – remains “tiny” compared to traditional metals markets, says a World Economic Forum (WEF) report published in April.
ICMM’s Dhawan believes both traders and banks have a “crucial role to play in meeting the required demand for critical minerals”.
“The role of commodity traders is to ensure that the right quantity and specification of the required metals are available to those who need them, and to also help improve traceability in the supply chain,” he says.
“The role of banks relates to providing debt financing for existing and new projects as well as driving higher standards by incorporating responsible mining standards into their lending criteria.”
Power struggles
The AI boom also has major implications for the supply of power, and by extension, the energy transition.
The computational power used by AI doubles every 100 days, the WEF says in a separate April report.
“The energy required to run AI tasks is already accelerating with an annual growth rate between 26% and 36%,” it says. “This means by 2028, AI could be using more power than the entire country of Iceland used in 2021.”
This creates several challenges in terms of power supply, HSBC Global Research says.
“Significant electricity demand growth, supercharged by AI, can not only put national climate goals at risk, but can strain power grids not equipped to deal with significant load growth,” its report says.
“Indeed, power grids around the world are facing increased vulnerabilities as they transition from fossil fuel systems to ones that distribute renewable electricity. This rapid growth in electricity demand from AI raises concerns over grid stability and energy prices.”
Data centres – crucial to training and running AI models – are expected to consume up to 4% of global power by the end of the decade, potentially more than double the figure for today, Goldman Sachs says in a May report.
“In the US and Europe, this increased demand will help drive the kind of electricity growth that hasn’t been seen in a generation,” the report says. “Along the way, the carbon dioxide emissions of data centres may more than double between 2022 and 2030.”
US utilities companies would be required to invest as much as US$50bn in new generation capacity to support data centres alone, Goldman Sachs says.
In Europe, power demand could grow by as much as 50% over the next 10 years.
The renewables industry had a record-breaking year in 2023, with output from solar and wind increasing by 38% compared to the previous year, research by Rystad Energy finds. It believes last year was the first time the share of power generated from renewable sources passed the 30% mark globally.
However, the energy transition could be threatened if renewables are not deployed quickly enough to meet a demand surge propelled by a new technological revolution.
Richard Kinder, executive chairman of US pipeline operator Kinder Morgan, told investors in April that tech companies are “beginning to recognise the role that natural gas and nuclear must play” in keeping data centres running.
“The emphasis on renewables as the only source of power is fatally flawed in terms of meeting the real demands of the market,” he said.
Lynn Good, chief executive of US-based Duke Energy Corporation, said at an industry event in April that the company’s pledge to close its coal-fired power plants over the next decade “is being challenged by all of the growth” in electricity demand.
The HSBC Global Research report notes AI itself could help tackle some of these issues, for example by predicting power demand patterns or improving models used to track emissions and reduce waste – although it notes that research remains limited into the energy demand of AI systems.
Traders eye opportunity
Again, commodity traders and banks may play a crucial role in responding to a spike in demand.
Trafigura’s global head of gas, power and renewables, Richard Holtum, told the FT Commodities event the company is “incredibly bullish” on electricity, and the trader is not alone in setting up power trading desks across the globe.
An Oliver Wyman study published in March found that gas and power trading generated around half of revenue in the commodity trading sector in 2022, overtaking oil. Growing demand is already being seen as a transformative opportunity in the trading sector.
“If you look at the physical markets, it’s still very much the old traditional commodities, and oil still rules,” Vollebrect says. “Globally, oil consumption is still growing annually at an average of 1 million barrels per day, maybe not in the European Union or the UK, but in many other countries.
“However, in power, many countries are experiencing constraints on the grid. Trading companies are adding teams on the power side, and this will continue to grow. This is an attractive market for traders, and is also a way for them to dilute their fossil fuels portfolio.”
McKinsey adds that hedge funds and banks could also be “attracted by growing value pools”.
“New opportunities in power and gas (but mostly in power) will likely emerge around three topics: entering new markets, data-driven trading, and new assets,” it says. Banks can also use their financing tools and market knowledge to offer “additional liquid and risk management offerings”.
“Such vibrant markets can both increase value pools and help facilitate the energy transition through investments in new and emerging technologies and products,” the report says.
“Doing so could have broader benefits in terms of meeting global climate goals and building and scaling a greener, cleaner future.”