China still anchors copper while AI, grids and defense add pressure

China keeps showing up in every copper discussion for a reason.

It accounts for about 58% of global refined copper usage, which makes it the center of gravity for the market whether people like that or not. Even a slower China still matters when the base is that large. Small changes in grid spending, construction, EV production, manufacturing or refined copper imports can move the whole market.

The part that gets more interesting now is that copper is no longer leaning on China alone.

AI data centers, grid upgrades, EVs, defense, India’s industrial growth and North American reshoring are adding demand from different directions. That makes copper less dependent on one clean narrative. It is still cyclical, but the demand stack looks broader than it did a few years ago.

China is also central to refining. S&P notes that China accounts for 12 Mt of 29 Mt of global smelting capacity. That means the country is not only a buyer of copper, but also a major processing hub. When concentrate supply gets tight, smelters feel it. When treatment charges fall, the whole chain starts showing stress before end users even notice.

That is why early copper projects are easier to care about right now. The market is not only asking where demand comes from. It is also asking where future concentrate, future feed and future copper supply could come from.

This is where I think Wilmac is worth looking at.

NovaRed’s Wilmac Copper-Gold Project sits in British Columbia’s Quesnel porphyry belt, about 10 km west of Hudbay’s producing Copper Mountain Mine. The project covers about 16,078 hectares, or roughly 160 square kilometers. That is a large enough footprint to follow targets across a district instead of betting everything on one small claim block.

The North Lamont update gave the project a more specific technical angle. NovaRed reported 43 soil samples, with copper values up to 379 ppm. The western cluster returned nine samples above 150 ppm copper, with an average of 209 ppm copper. The company also reported moderate-to-high Sr/Y fertility signatures, moderate V/Sc oxidation indicators and overlap with a magnetic anomaly.

That is a better setup than just saying the project is big. Soil chemistry is starting to line up with geophysics, and North Lamont now has a clear next step through the IP/AMT survey. The survey has “No Permit Required” authorization and is part of the broader 2026 geophysical program.

I’m not looking at NRED as a China-demand trade. I’m looking at it as an upstream copper exploration name in a market where demand is widening and future supply is getting more attention. China still anchors the copper market, but the newer demand layers make projects in real copper districts easier to follow. Wilmac now has scale, location and a North Lamont target that can be sharpened with the next geophysical work.