In a report published Thursday, researchers estimated demand for the metal will jump 50% from current levels to 42 million metric tons by 2040, while supply will shrink in the coming years.

The result will be a shortfall of 10 million tons that represents a “systemic risk for global industries, technological advancement and economic growth,” the report said.

Meanwhile, copper prices have surged to more than $13,000 per metric ton from just over $8,000 in April 2025, as President Donald Trump’s global tariffs and mining disruptions weighed on supplies. Prices for precious metals like gold, silver, palladium, and platinum, which also have industrial uses, have shot up in recently months as well.

The report highlights four key drivers of copper demand: core economic sectors, the transition to electrification, data centers powering the AI boom, and high-tech weapons.

A fifth potential driver is humanoid robots, S&P Global said, citing projections of 1 billion to 10 billion of them in operation by 2040.

“The future is not just copper-intensive, it is copper-enabled. Every new building, every line of digital code, every renewable megawatt, every new car, every advanced weapon system depends on the metal,” Aurian De La Noue, executive director for critical minerals and energy transition consulting at S&P Global Energy, said in a statement.

“Multilateral cooperation and regional diversification will be crucial to ensure a more resilient global copper system—one commensurate with copper’s role as the linchpin of electrification, digitalization, and security in the age of AI.”

Increased mining is necessary to alleviate the supply pressure, but it takes 17 years, on average, for a new mine to yield fresh copper after it’s first discovered. That’s as several headwinds weigh on production, including geology, engineering, logistics, regulatory, and environmental issues.

The concentration of copper mining and processing represent risks too, according to S&P Global. For example, just six countries account for roughly two-thirds of mining production, and China alone commands about 40% of global smelting capacity.

Beijing already leverages its dominance in rare earth minerals—which are also critical in a range of technologies—as a geopolitical tool in disputes with rivals like the U.S. and Japan.

The report warned copper’s reliance on a handful of countries makes global supplies and prices vulnerable to disruptions, policy shocks, and trade barriers.

“Several countries have deemed copper a ‘critical metal’ over the past half decade, including, in 2025, the United States. And with good reason,” said study co-chair Carlos Pascual, senior vice president at S&P Global Energy for geopolitics and international affairs. 

“Copper is the connective artery linking physical machinery, digital intelligence, mobility, infrastructure, communication, and security systems,” Pascual said. “The future availability of copper has become a matter of strategic importance.”

McMillon, who has been leading the $905 billion grocery chain giant since 2011, enjoys around $27.5 million in total compensation. He’s set to retire at the end of this month, and is bowing out on a monetary high; in his final year as CEO, McMillon took home a $1.5 million salary, while also receiving $20.4 million in stock awards and $4.4 million in non-equity incentive plan compensation. 

It’s a far cry from the pay of his first Walmart job. The outgoing CEO started working in the business’ warehouses in the summer of 1984, unloading trailers for just $6.50 an hour. That’s 481 times lower than the average $3,127 he earns every hour of the day as CEO. Even within one minute he blows that figure out of the water, reeling in around $52 in 60 seconds. 

Now, it takes less than 20 hours for the Walmart CEO to outearn the average U.S. worker who takes home about $62,088 a year, according to 2025 first quarter wage data from the BLS. And while it could take decades for Americans to pool up savings for a house, McMillon can afford it within one workweek. It only takes 5.85 days for the chief executive to reel in $439,000, the median price of a U.S. home, according to a CEO salary tool from Resume.ai. And over the span of U.S. workers’ dreaded 30-minute commute to the office, McMillon is already $1,563 richer. Every second, the chief executive can watch his bank account inch up nearly $1.

Fortune reached out to Walmart for comment.

While CEOs are reaping record-breaking salaries, Americans are bunkering down

McMillon is just one face in a crowd of CEOs making headlines for their eyebrow-raising salaries. 

Late last year, the leader of Tesla and the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, secured a $1 trillion pay package at his EV company, spurring criticism of the growing wealth divide between the world’s wealthiest and poorest workers. 

And Tim Cook, the CEO of $3.8 trillion tech giant Apple, reaped $74.6 million in 2024, up 18% from $63.2 million the year before. In only about seven hours, Cook has already outearned the typical American worker, and in 2.15 days, can afford the average U.S. home. But he’s not even the highest-paid CEO leading a large, billion-dollar public U.S. company. Rick Smith, the chief executive of $45.5 billion defense-tech company Axon, took home a whopping $164.5 million, according to an analysis from Equilar. 

Meanwhile, America’s poorest aren’t enjoying the spoils of their employers’ success. The after-tax wages of U.S. workers in the lowest-income group grew just 1.3% year-over-year this July, down from 1.6% in the month before, according to the Bank of America Institute. In that same period, higher-income wages swelled to 3.2%—the third consecutive monthly increase. It marked the widest wealth divide between lower and upper-income households in four years.

“In some sense, we had an improvement in lower-income wage growth since the pandemic, and now that’s gone into reverse,” David Tinsley, senior economist for the Bank of America Institute, told Fortune this August. “There was a narrowing of wealth inequality, and now it’s widening.”

However, some companies are stepping up to ensure that their workers get a fair share of the success. Samsung rolled out a new three-year program last year, granting payouts to its employees based on the company’s stock price starting October 2025 to the same month in 2028, according to reporting from Bloomberg. The plan also gives workers the option to receive up to half of that payout in shares instead of cash. Prior to this monetary move, the only other instance Samsung workers were granted stock was when Samsung distributed 30 shares to staffers as part of a union deal.

And even billionaires are responding to the growing wealth divide between the haves and have-nots. In response to an Oxfam study’s findings that billionaire wealth increased by $33 trillion between 2015 and 2025, entrepreneur Mark Cuban pointed out that wealth has surged because “the stock market has gone straight up.” He called out that workers should get a slice of the pie. 

“You know who is funding the increase, particularly lately? Retail investors. 401ks,” Cuban wrote on X last year. “The better question is, why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO?”

While Trump administration officials continued Thursday to paint Good as a domestic terrorist who attempted to ram federal agents with her Honda Pilot, members of her family, friends and neighbors mourned a woman they remembered as gentle, kind and openhearted.

Good, her 6-year-old son and her wife only recently relocated to Minneapolis from Kansas City, Missouri. The family settled on a quiet residential street of older homes and multifamily buildings, some front porches festooned with pride flags still twinkling with holiday lights. A day after her death, neighbors had grown weary of talking to reporters. A handwritten sign posted to one front door read “NO MEDIA INQUIRES” and “JUSTICE FOR RENEE.”

Far from the worst-of-the-worst criminals President Donald Trump said his immigration crackdown would target, Good was a U.S. citizen born in Colorado who apparently was never charged with anything beyond a single traffic ticket.

In social media accounts, she described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom.” She said she was currently “experiencing Minneapolis,” displaying a pride emoji on her Instagram account. A profile picture posted to Pinterest shows her smiling and holding a young child against her cheek, along with posts about tattoos, hairstyles and home decorating.

Her ex-husband, who asked not to be named out of concern for the safety of their children, said Good was no activist and he never knew her to participate in a protest of any kind. He said she was headed home before the encounter with a group of ICE agents on a snowy street.

State and local officials and protesters have rejected the Trump administration’s characterization of the shooting, with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey saying video recordings show the self-defense argument is “garbage.”

Video taken by bystanders posted to social media shows an officer approaching her car, demanding she open the door and grabbing the handle. When she begins to pull forward, a different ICE officer standing in front of the vehicle pulls his weapon and immediately fires at least two shots into the vehicle at close range.

The entire incident was over in less than 10 seconds.

In another video taken immediately after the shooting, a distraught woman is seen sitting near the vehicle, wailing, “That’s my wife, I don’t know what to do!”

Calls and messages to Good’s wife received no response.

On Thursday a few dozen people gathered on the one-way street where Good was killed, blocking the road with steel drums filled with burning wood for warmth to ward of a pelting freezing rain. Passersby stopped to pay their respects at a makeshift memorial with bouquets of flowers and a hand-fashioned cross.

Good’s ex-husband said she was a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger. She loved to sing, participating in a chorus in high school and studying vocal performance in college.

She studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia and won a prize in 2020 for one of her works, according to a post on the school’s English department Facebook page. She also hosted a podcast with her second husband, who died in 2023.

Kent Wascom, who taught Good in the creative writing program at Old Dominion, recalled her juggling the birth of her child with work and school in 2019. He described her as “incredibly caring of her peers.”

“What stood out to me in her prose was that, unlike a lot of young fiction writers, her focus was outward rather than inward,” Wascom said. “A creative writing workshop can be a gnarly place with a lot of egos and competition, but her presence was something that helped make that classroom a really supportive place.”

Good had a daughter and a son from her first marriage, who are now 15 and 12. Her 6-year-old son was from her second marriage.

Her ex-husband said she was primarily a stay-at-home mom in recent years but previously worked as a dental assistant and at a credit union.

Donna Ganger, her mother, told the Minnesota Star Tribune the family was notified of the death late Wednesday morning. She did not respond to calls or messages from the AP.

“Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” Ganger told the newspaper. “She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.”

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Biesecker reported from Washington and Mustian from New York. Associated Press writer Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Missouri, contributed.