Mining

Power Struggle: The age of demand simultaneity

Why electrification, artificial intelligence and defence expansion are colliding with finite materials

In the quiet, data-heavy corners of the financial world, Craig Tindale has earned a reputation for asking the kind of questions that make policymakers lose sleep. A private investor and former business journalist, his research on critical minerals has reportedly caught the eye of both the Pentagon and the White House.

But Tindale isn’t looking at the usual market fluctuations. He is looking at physics.

Speaking on the Power Struggle podcast, Tindale warned that we are standing in the middle of what may be the most “consequential resource story of our time”. It has nothing to do with oil. Instead, it centers on the red metal that has underpinned human civilization for millennia: copper.

The story he tells is not one of simple scarcity. It is a story of a looming, planetary collision he calls “demand simultaneity”.

The great collision

For the first time in industrial history, three massive global transitions are happening at exactly the same time: the drive for electrification, the explosion of artificial intelligence, and a worldwide military rearmament.

Each of these massive sectors is ravenous for the exact same finite pool of materials. As Tindale points out, the ultimate constraint on our global ambitions might not be money or political will, but “pure physics”.

This explosive new demand does not exist in a vacuum. It competes directly with the copper needed to rewire the planet for a low-carbon economy, alongside the vast amounts required for modern munitions and defence infrastructure. It is a collision of needs that global supply chains are entirely ill-prepared to handle.

The illusion of ownership

The crisis is compounded by a profound, lingering misunderstanding in the West about what actually constitutes a “resource”.

There is an assumption that the country where the ore is dug out of the ground inherently owns the resource. Tindale argues this is a dangerous delusion.

“We always thought that the resource was owned by the country,” he observes. But the stark reality of the modern era is that “the resource is not a resource until it’s its final product”.

This is where a massive geopolitical “chokehold” becomes visible. While countries like Canada, Chile, and Peru may extract the raw ore from the earth, China controls the “mid-tier refining“.

Currently, “50, 60% of copper is processed and refined in China”. Even Canadian copper concentrate is often loaded onto ships and sent across the Pacific to be refined before it can ever be used in Western manufacturing.

This concentration of processing power extends far beyond copper. The derivatives of refining copper, zinc, and lead include silver—a metal that is absolutely essential for both AI data centres and solar panels. As Tindale points out, “70% of our silver comes from those three metals being refined in China and sent back to the West”.

Material denial

When you run the numbers, Tindale says, the math simply does not add up for the West’s current trajectory.

He points to gallium, a critical component required for high-performance semiconductors. “If in five years, if we look at the forward forecasts of Nvidia, they will be using more than the annual current production of gallium to build their products,” he says. He follows this with a characteristic, pointed challenge: “Now, that doesn’t sound realistic, does it?”.

When one goes through the list of critical metals and chemicals, “unexplainable gaps in supply” begin to emerge across the board. Tindale has coined the term “material denial” to describe this phenomenon, warning that it “means that the future can’t happen” under current conditions.

We are planning for a high-tech future that the physical reality of our planet may not be able to deliver, at least not at the lightning speed currently promised by Silicon Valley and political leaders.

The periodic table always wins

Tindale’s outlook is not one of total despair, but of radical realism.

He suggests that this impending material crunch will force humanity to innovate in ways we haven’t fully understood yet. We will have to learn how to “recycle fly ash” and repurpose “red tailings and copper tailings”. It will be a transition marked by “great pain,” but it may eventually push us toward a much more sophisticated, circular economy.

Until then, the world remains caught in a high-stakes power struggle between digital dreams and physical limits. As Tindale makes perfectly clear, you can print money and you can manufacture ambition, but you cannot negotiate with the periodic table.

For the informed observer, the message is clear: watch the mines, watch the refineries, and watch the physics. That is where the real history of the 21st century is being written.

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Ian Biana is a writer for Resource Works, a non-partisan organization that champions responsible resource development in British Columbia and Canada. Reach Ian at [email protected].

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