On Bloomberg Businessweek’s weekend edition, Joe Magazine, a partner at Fortuna Investments and a Miami Beach city commissioner, said “a race about who will decide the future of the world. The US versus China.” Washington should fix permitting and let capital do the work to win that race, he argued. Fixing permitting and letting capital do the work would suffice. Host Carol Massar countered that the United States leans on China because mining and refining is “a pretty bad business” with tough margins and environmental costs.
They are both half right, and the market scoreboard proves it.
Copper-Versus-Lithium Split Tells the Real Story
Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE:FCX | FCX Price Prediction) trades at $70.76, up 58.43% over the past year and 678.96% over ten years. Copper is winning because every gigawatt of AI data-center capacity needs it.
Lithium Americas (NYSE:LAC) sits at $2.81, down 35.55% year to date. MP Materials (NYSE:MP) trades at $47.51, down 28.89% over the past year. The “bad business” is paying, while the strategic-narrative names are bleeding.
Why Amazon Is the Reason Anyone Cares
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), market cap roughly $2.74 trillion, spent $54.2 billion of capex in the second quarter alone, up 68.4% year over year, and has guided to roughly $200 billion in capex across 2026, mostly for AI infrastructure. AWS is a $169 billion annualized revenue run rate business with a $496 billion backlog, growing triple digits year over year. AWS revenue rose 37% to $42.23 billion, its fastest pace in 18 quarters.
That is the machine that turns Magazine’s abstraction into procurement. Every Trainium cluster, every NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) rack Amazon plans to deploy (1 million-plus GPUs starting in 2026), every megawatt of the 3.8 GW AWS added in the trailing 12 months needs copper busbars, transformer steel, and rare-earth magnets. Amazon itself flags “resource and supply volatility including memory chips” and geopolitical risk in its own filings. The China dependency Magazine wants Washington to break is the same dependency AWS is quietly hedging with custom silicon and long-dated power contracts.
What to Watch
Two signals decide the next four quarters. First, whether the Commerce Department accelerates permitting on Nevada lithium or Western copper projects large enough to move supply curves. Second, whether hyperscaler capex, led by Amazon’s Q3 operating income guide of $22.5 to $26.5 billion, keeps compounding or cracks. Retail is already voting: Lithium Americas led Reddit’s most-discussed tickers on September 17 with 157 comments, ahead of Amazon. The scoreboard says they are shorting the wrong metal.