Jefferies is buying gold miners and ignoring the gold

The smartest call on gold miners right now has almost nothing to do with the price of gold.

Gold has been the headline trade for two years. It sits near $4,140 an ounce as of June 23, after a record start to 2026 and a long slide into the summer, and the companies that dig it are sitting on piles of cash. Most investors still treat those miners as one thing, a pure bet on bullion.

A different metal is starting to drive the story, and it is buried in the same rock.

Artificial intelligence is straining the world's supply of copper, the wiring that carries power through every data center going up. Some of the biggest gold miners pull it out of the very same pits, which quietly ties a classic safe-haven trade to the most aggressive growth theme in the market.

Wall Street has started to act on it. Jefferies just put Barrick (B) on a short list of miners it wants clients to own, and the reason was copper, not the metal in the company's name.

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Why the AI boom needs so much copper

Copper is the plumbing of electrification. Nothing moves power, from a wind turbine to a server rack, without a lot of it.

Electrification was already pulling hard on copper before AI arrived, and the data center buildout is stacking fresh demand on a market that was tight to begin with. A single one-gigawatt AI data center can use up to 50,000 metric tons of copper, according to U.S. Global Investors. The industry is racing to build that kind of capacity each year.

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The supply side cannot keep pace. New mines take a decade to permit and build, and the 2026 average copper price is running just above $12,000 a metric ton, with a cumulative deficit near three million tonnes projected by 2036, according to S&P Global.

Copper slipped to a roughly four-week low on June 23 on signs of easier near-term supply, a reminder that the case here rests on a multi-year deficit, not this month's tape, according to Trading Economics. When a metal you need cannot be made faster, the price does the rationing, and the producers already pulling it out collect.

Related: Bank of America's latest gold outlook sends a different signal

Why Jefferies is buying gold miners for copper

This is where the two metals collide, and where most readers stop paying attention right when they should lean in.

On June 9, 2026, Jefferies named Barrick one of four buy-rated miners, alongside Kinross, Endeavour Mining and Capstone Copper, that it expects to gain from rising copper prices, pointing to a U.S. capital-spending cycle built around data centers and power, plus a structural supply deficit, according to Investing.com. The buy case rests on copper and that spending cycle, not on where gold trades next.

Permitting, grid bottlenecks and years-long build times mean supply cannot answer a price signal quickly, which turns the call into a multi-year position, not a trade.

Kinross Gold (KGC) made the same list. Bank of America analyst Lawson Winder had already lifted his Kinross target to $46 from $43.50 on June 1, 2026, keeping a buy rating, according to Insider Monkey.

Copper production rose 11 percent to 49,000 metric tons in the first quarter, and Barrick is on track for first copper from its Lumwana expansion in Zambia by the end of the first quarter of 2028, according to a company statement. The bigger prize is Reko Diq, a copper-and-gold project in Pakistan that then-CEO Mark Bristow said could generate about $74 billion in free cash flow over 37 years, according to Mining.com.

In my analysis, that is the part the market is slow to price. A gold miner with a second growth engine in the metal of the AI age is a different animal than a pure gold play.

The numbers behind Barrick's copper bet

A copper story is only as good as the cash and the leadership behind it. Barrick has both, with one open question.

The company produced 719,000 ounces of gold in the first quarter, beating its guidance range of 640,000 to 680,000 ounces, and generated $1.21 billion in attributable free cash flow, up 195 percent from a year earlier, according to a company statement. It also approved a fresh $3 billion buyback.

The leadership question is the catch. Mark Hill runs the company as president and chief executive after Mark Bristow stepped down on Sept. 29, 2025, and a copper-heavy strategy is now his to prove. Hill has framed his tenure around execution over promises. Barrick "started the year with another strong quarter," he said, citing performance ahead of plan on gold output and costs, according to a company statement.

Here is Barrick's copper turn at a glance:

• Copper output rose 11 percent to 49,000 metric tons in the first quarter, according to a company statement.
• Jefferies named Barrick a buy on copper upside tied to data center and power spending, according to Investing.com.
• A one-gigawatt AI data center can use up to 50,000 metric tons of copper, according to U.S. Global Investors.
• UBS raised its Barrick target to $54 from $50 with a buy rating on May 12, 2026, according to MarketScreener.

The copper exposure cuts both ways. Reko Diq sits in a region that has faced security reviews, and a metal near records can fall as fast as it climbed, as the June pullback showed.

What the copper angle means for you

If you own a major gold miner, check what else is coming out of its mines. The copper inside a name like Barrick is becoming a real piece of the story, and it ties your gold stock to the AI buildout before the share price fully reflects it.

That link is the opportunity and the risk in one. A gold reversal would still sting, but a copper deficit driven by data centers does not care which way gold trades next quarter.

When I weigh a miner now, I look past the gold price to the second metal on its books. A producer with copper growth funded by record gold cash has two ways to win, and only one of them depends on the trade everyone already knows.

The crowd is still pricing these companies on gold. The smarter question heading into the back half of 2026 is what their copper is worth, and how many investors figure that out before the next data center breaks ground.

Related: Copper's quiet supply squeeze is reshaping the investment case

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This story was originally published June 24, 2026 at 9:13 AM.