Mining Giants versus Computer Geeks
Prepping for the 2026 Mining Indaba
During the first month of 2026, gold prices experienced a series of record highs, driven indisputably by a collective retreat to more reliable stores of wealth in an era of elevated market and geopolitical risk. The price of the precious metal surged close to $5,600 per troy ounce on 29 January before closing at about $5,300, representing an increase of over 20% from the end of 2025. Silver similarly climbed, breaking the $100 mark for the first time in the last week of January and briefly reaching a high of almost $120 on 29 January, marking a gain of over 50% from the month prior. Responding to a confluence of supply constraints and bullish sentiment around future demand, much of it linked to AI infrastructure spending, the copper benchmark three-month price on the London Metal Exchange also fleetingly reached a record high of over $14,000 per tonne on 29 January, before closing at about $13,600 – around 10% higher than a month before.
Somewhat disconcertingly, the market did decrease quite suddenly and dramatically the following day, 30 January 2026, when the nomination of Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve Chair was announced and the fear-gauge declined. Notwithstanding this, at around $4,600 per troy ounce in the first week of February, gold is up nearly 130% compared with two years ago, while silver is up almost 200% and copper about 60%.
This has led to a substantial revaluation of the largest mining companies in the world, with the top 50 adding in the region of half a trillion dollars to their combined market capitalisation this year. The largest five mining companies by market capitalisation currently include Australia’s BHP, with a market cap of about $180 billion, British-Australian multinational Rio Tinto and US-listed Southern Copper, each with a market cap of approximately $155 billion, China’s Zijin Mining, with a market cap of around $150 billion, and the US’s Newmont Corporation, with a market cap of about $120 billion.
Taken together, these five mining giants have a combined market cap of approximately $760 billion. To place this figure in context, at the end of January, OpenAI announced that it was seeking to raise $100 billion at a valuation of $750 billion to fund its ambitious expansion. This means that the collective market value of the world’s five largest mining companies is roughly equivalent to that of a single technology firm that generated only $13 billion in revenue last year and is already beginning to see growth in monthly active users taper. By contrast, the five largest mining companies reported cumulative revenues of more than $180 billion for the 2024 financial year.
Consider, also, that Microsoft – which holds a 27% stake in OpenAI – currently has a market cap of $3.2 trillion, making it worth almost three times the $1.2 trillion total market cap of the ten largest mining companies in the world combined. Microsoft’s revenue of $282 billion for the last financial year also exceeds the $246 billion generated collectively by nine of those ten companies, excluding Glencore, the tenth largest mining company by market cap, whose revenue is not directly comparable due to its substantial commodities trading operations. Yet even Microsoft’s revenue is eclipsed by that of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, which controls roughly 90% of the global search engine market. Alphabet Inc. has a market cap of $4.1 trillion, and reported $350 billion in revenue – around one-and-a-half times the combined revenue of the nine largest mining companies in the world.
The disparity is even more striking at the level of profitability: Microsoft and Alphabet each reported net income of around $100 billion, while the nine largest mining companies posted individual net incomes ranging from about $2 billion to $12 billion. Each of the two technology giants independently generated more than twice the net income of the entire group of the nine mining companies combined.
These figures lead to a deeply discouraging conclusion: we live in an era in which eyeballs on screens for narrow-casted advertising of consumer goods commands greater economic value than business software, which itself is valued far above the global mining industry that provides the raw materials that make these businesses possible in the first place. The mining industry supplies the essential inputs for semiconductor chips, data centres, and storage hardware – the material foundations of the cloud, which, for all its abstraction, is merely a software-mediated extension of the physical infrastructure operated by companies such as Google. Yet while vast sums are now being poured into AI and data-centre buildouts, until very recently, comparatively little of this value has accrued to the mining companies whose resources underpin the entire system.
This is an important point to bear in mind as delegates from the global mining industry arrive in Cape Town next week for the 2026 iteration of the Investing in African Mining Indaba, where they will debate the future of an industry so pivotal that without it, the technologies powering the ever-bolder promises being made about AI by far larger and more profitable technology firms would quite literally not exist. At some point, surely the companies responsible for providing the physical foundations of the ethereal cloud should wield more leverage than the abstraction they sustain.
This article is an opinion piece by David Buckham. The views in this article are those of Buckham, and do not represent the views of BusinessTech and its associated companies.
David Buckham is the Founder and CEO of international consultancy Monocle Solutions. He is co-author, alongside Robin Wilkinson, of the bestselling The Spell: A Story of Human Progress and How the West Lost its Soul.
Loading ...