SocGen称AI需求与美国铜关税套利正在改写铜价分析框架

The traditional playbook for analyzing copper (CPER) markets has become obsolete, according to Societe Generale.
Since February 2025, copper has been driven not only by conventional supply and demand fundamentals but also by two powerful new forces: artificial intelligence infrastructure spending and U.S. trade policy-induced arbitrage flows, analyst Mike Haigh wrote in a note to clients. Limited mine supply, strong competition for concentrates, and surging demand from AI, data centers, power grids, and EVs have all supported prices—but tariff-related arbitrage has simultaneously redirected massive volumes of copper inventories toward the U.S., tightening physical availability elsewhere.
These dynamics have made the market "increasingly difficult to analyse using traditional frameworks alone," Haigh wrote.
While both major copper exchanges are exposed to the same structural demand themes, their responses are far from identical. LME copper provides a "purer expression" of the AI-driven demand narrative, reflecting its closer linkage to global physical market fundamentals, Societe Generale noted. By the end of the observation period, nearly all of the cumulative LME return could be explained by the bank's factor model, with around 50% of the move since early 2025 attributable to AI-related factors, including data center capital expenditure momentum.
COMEX copper, by contrast, exhibits far greater sensitivity to the U.S. dollar index (DXY), and a significant share of returns remains unexplained until a speculative-positioning factor is introduced. The bank found that positioning on COMEX copper is roughly five times more volatile than on LME, translating into 22% annualized realized volatility for U.S. copper versus just 13% for LME. Investors seeking exposure to the AI-driven copper theme may find that LME prices offer a more direct path—AI-related investment ultimately translates into expectations for higher physical copper demand, which is "more naturally reflected in LME pricing."
U.S. trade policy has fundamentally altered copper's geographic distribution, SocGen said. Key tariff-related events—including the announcement of Section 232 investigations and 50% tariffs on semi-finished copper products—have frightened speculators and pulled managed money out of the market. The resulting arbitrage flows have redirected large volumes of physical copper toward the United States, severely tightening availability on global exchanges.
This has shifted the character of COMEX itself. Previously one of the most financialized commodity markets alongside gold and silver, COMEX copper has seen its speculators-to-hedgers ratio collapse from elevated levels to the 0.5–0.6 range traditionally associated with the LME. The tariff narrative, in effect, transformed a heavily speculative market into something resembling a more physically grounded one.