Critical Metal Prices Are Setting Records While Investment Falls

The International Energy Agency has published a finding that should hold any allocator's attention: critical mineral prices rebounded through 2025 and early 2026 as supply conditions tightened, while investment in those same minerals fell 9% in 2025, ending several years of growth 1. Copper passed 14,000 dollars a tonne in May, a record 1, and was still trading near those levels in late August, as storm damage in Chile pushed Antofagasta to cut its 2026 output forecast to 625,000–655,000 tonnes 2. A sector where the price rises and capital leaves is not in equilibrium. The usual sequence runs the other way: high prices summon investment, which eventually brings them back down. Here the second term is missing.

The adjustment was highly uneven across metals. Battery metals absorbed most of the cut, with capital spending down more than 20%, and lithium producers reduced investment by roughly 40% 1. Copper, by contrast, concentrates the expected volume growth, adding around 7 million tonnes to projected supply through 2040 1. Capital is not leaving the energy transition. It is reallocating from the speculative to the structural.

The same report adds a geopolitical layer. Mineral tariff codes under Chinese export controls have tripled since 2023; the Democratic Republic of Congo has imposed a cobalt export quota, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have restricted lithium and graphite; excluding rare earths, the top refining country's average share reached 72% in 2025 1. Supply is not only short — it is increasingly weaponised.

The objection concerns how to read the signal. Falling investment may reflect recovered financial discipline rather than disengagement — the likelier reading for lithium after years of excess. But either way, the physical result is identical: fewer tonnes available by the end of the decade.

The bottom line

Critical metals exposure belongs with established producers of a metal whose investment is still growing, not with the complex as a whole. Copper meets that test. Battery metals no longer do.

What to watch: the 2026 investment figures. A second consecutive year of decline would turn a cycle adjustment into a durable supply constraint.