Robert Friedland

[audience applauding] Thank you, thank you. There’s a little clicker there, huh? Yes. Well, we have thirty minutes to an hour, and we can do questions and answers. I see an old friend of mine, Terry, in the second row. Amazing. Well, the copper price happens to be up, and BMO just raised their target to $18,000 a ton and the Germans to $22,000 a ton a few minutes ago. So we’re gonna call this strictly about copper, but we’re really gonna talk about everything.

So let’s start with reminding everybody that life is short. We’re screaming through space on a ball of primarily iron, oxygen, and silicon. That’s our very delicate planet. And we think our planet is four and a half billion years old, but our financial markets have only existed for a few nanoseconds of geological time. And what’s going on in that geological time has got us to a very strange and dangerous current moment.

So the oil market is enormous, and for about a hundred years, we’ve been fighting wars over crude oil. I really doubt that when Shock and Awe happened and we went after Saddam Hussein, that we would have bothered to do it if he didn’t have a drop of crude oil. But these other metals and critical materials we’re gonna talk about today are tiny, tiny markets compared to crude oil. The iron market is the most fungible metal market, and then comes gold and copper. They’re comparable in size, and then all the rest of them get smaller and smaller and smaller.

For the metals that we mined last year, if you just look at the scale, iron ore is just a huge lump there. And the industrial metals, you can clearly see copper and lead and aluminum. But the really scary ones are these tiny ones on the lower right that you’ve never heard of, very few people know about them, and many of them are gonna be far more valuable than precious. And how are we going to do that and get enough of these things at the scale of the world economy when our economy is clearly balkanizing at all levels?

So when we talk about copper, we’ve been mining it since the days of Mohenjo-daro, roughly ten thousand years actually, if we wanna go all the way back to the earliest copper mining. And as best as we can determine, we’ve mined 700 million metric tons of this metal as a species, and most of that is still with us. If you want to get all of that recovered, if we tear down every building in North America, we can recover about 250 million metric tons, including the wiring that’s keeping the lights on in this building. So if we go back to the time of the wooly mammoth, and we do that in Europe, we get about 200 million metric tons, and in Asia, another 250 million metric tons. So we strip it all back to nothing, we can recover about 680 million metric tons, and we’d be great, but we would be definitely freezing in the dark.

Now, just to maintain 3% GDP growth, we’re using 30 million tons a year. About 4 million tons is recycled. Just to maintain 3% GDP growth, absent the AI phenomenon, data centers, electric cars, we have to mine the same amount of copper in the next eighteen years as we mined in the last ten thousand years. And I don’t know anybody in the copper business, and I think I know everybody important in the business, who really understands where we’re gonna find all that metal. So we’re gonna have to meet somewhere in the middle. There’s gonna have to be a higher price, some demand destruction, and hopefully we can settle this all out into a balance without war, but war has already broken out. We’re at war right now, and that’s something we’re gonna have to talk about.

Now, a lot of people think they use copper in these data centers for electrical conductivity, but that’s not really true. One of the most important reasons is the transmittance of heat. Copper has a unique ability to move heat. That’s why when you had a 327 cubic inch Chevrolet V8 engine, the radiator was made out of copper. Those little fins to cool off hot water in the engine. Copper not only conducts electrical energy better than anything other than gold and silver, which are too expensive for the purpose, but it also is very, very, very important to conduct heat. And these data centers create astronomic amounts of heat, and this is one of the reasons why we’re beginning to see some pushback against these urban heat centers that these data centers will create.

I think it’s very conservative and very real. We’ve looked at these numbers for a long time. We need six tier one mines to come online every year till 2050. By the way, I’m scheduled to be a hundred years old in 2050. But that would be about 40% for electrification, data centers, and the grid if we really think we’re going to unleash this technology that may or may not be smarter than we are as human beings.

Now, if we wanna look at the number of copper discoveries in the world, these are all of the copper discoveries that have occurred in the last thirty years. And you can see that our group has been responsible for more of them than anybody, and we’ve been looking all over this little planet. So there’s Oyu Tolgoi in Mongolia, which has had about $22 billion of capital invested. And then Kamoa-Kakula, which is broken in pieces but is the largest copper discovery on the planet in the last thirty years.

And we just worked from first principles. If I came from Mars in a flying saucer made out of green cheese and my masters sent me here, and by the way, we were seeing a lot of UAP, this might actually be true that they’re here, I would have to go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo because that’s where the metal is. A lot of the porphyry coppers in Chile are gradually declining in grade, including the largest of them all, La Escondida. So first principle said, whether we like it or not, despite the civil war that occurred in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we went there. And today, the Congo is the second largest producer of copper metal of any other nation in the world. It’s past Peru, and the resource endowment is just beginning to be tapped. So this is one of the only places we can go and really make a difference if you want to keep these lights on.

So when we look at all of the world’s copper mines in scale, let’s go back to 1985. The size of the circle is how much metal is contained, but the higher they are up there in the vertical axis, the higher the grade. You can see Ojojona is about one and a half percent copper when you include the gold equivalent with the copper. Ojojona is probably the second largest gold resource in a single mine in the world after Grasberg. A lot of people think of Ojojona as a copper mine, but it’s very gold rich. And then there’s Kamoa, Kukula, Makoko, and others coming, which don’t have any gold. All we have is copper. What a bummer. Would have been a lot better if there was gold with our copper.

But as you can see, we’re just not finding very many copper mines. And then even the ones that we do find, they’re much, much lower in grade. And we have much higher diesel costs. We have much higher sulfuric acid costs. We have much higher capital costs. We have governments becoming rather difficult to deal with. But when I’m talking to you about how hard it is to find a mine and what a miserable business it is to be in the mining industry, I can assure you I’m speaking from my own experience. This is one of the most difficult, painful things in the world is to find a tier one mine and bring it on stream in less than twenty years. It’s extremely difficult and crazy undertaking.

By the way, that chart came from Standard and Poor’s, S&P. So they’re a big outfit. I didn’t make that chart. So the 636 million tons of copper were discovered since 1985. And there’s 419 million tons. You can see that it’s getting harder and harder to find them.

[upbeat music] Let’s have a look at the Western Forelands. So we just updated this remarkable mineral resource. Ivanhoe Mines owns this area. We’ve been working here for thirty-five years. I’d just like you to have a look at this and understand where we had to go to find this metal. Now, these are not porphyry copper mines. These are not giant loaves of bread like you have in Chile. This is oil field geology that happens to have copper. And those blue lines are the historical copper belt in Zambia and the Congo. But in the Western Forelands, the mineralization was formed in an undisturbed blanket. When you find it, it just goes forever. It goes for miles and miles.

Kamoka Kula has 55 million tons of copper. That is the largest discovery on our planet. But the Western Forelands is showing that there is no theoretical limit on what we can find if we keep drilling. In 2023, we had 5 million tons of contained copper there, and we just kept on expanding our drilling budget. Since then, we’ve added another 7 million tons to about 12 million tons of contained copper at a 1% cutoff grade. We ignore the copper if it’s less than 1%. And this is the world’s largest copper discovery after Kamoka Kula. And what’s really great about it is we don’t have a Chinese partner. We own it. And it daylights on the western edge of the basin, so it can be open-pit mined.

So this is by far the world’s largest and highest grade copper discovery in the last ten years, and it gets bigger every day. And the cost to find this copper is around a half a penny a pound. So copper is trading around $6.50 a pound. No one is finding copper on this planet at a half a penny a pound, and this will continue. It’s just amazing how fast this resource continues to grow. This is the largest drilling program we’ve ever undertaken. This year, about 95,000 meters. And we will come out with new numbers, but we can’t catch up with the numbers because they have to be independently audited. Next year, we’ll drill 120,000 meters, and we’re converting shallow resources to inferred and really hardened resources.

Now, when you look at the Western Forelands, that’s all you see. It’s an ocean of scrubby grass. Most of that cover is sand. And we will give you a scoping study in the first quarter of 2027 about how to bring this district into production. But it will look like this. There’ll be shallow open pits. This is an AI image when we say conceptual. But it will be nothing like the Kamoka Kula mines, which are about as deep as one or two Eiffel Towers. So you can see that the Western Forelands is right next to the existing mines, and we’ll share the same railroads, same electrical capacity, hydropower.

And this new railroad, thank you for the G7 nations, cuts our cost to get this copper to market in half. When we say that we’re gonna deliver copper to market at about $1.30, $1.40 a pound, it’s only about 90 cents a pound to discover and develop that copper in the Congo. But there’s 40 or 50 cents of transportation cost. And that transportation cost will be dramatically lowered now that we have new rail and port opening up this part of the central part of Africa to the Angolan coast.

So this is the fastest production of copper for the lowest amount of money in the history of the copper mining industry. We invested $1.3 million for the phase one mine, and we recovered the money in ten months. So it was over a 100% IRR, and then we took that cash flow and did it again and again, building three concentrators with a 17 million tons a year capacity. And then we refurbished an existing hydroelectric dam. I’m gonna show you a picture of that. And now we’ve built the largest solar field in the world at a mine, and it’s gonna get much bigger. And we built a smelter, all with internally generated cash flow. So we kicked the ball with $1.3 billion, and roughly $7 billion has gone into what we’re gonna show you, all with internally generated cash after the initial investment.

Now, this hydroelectric dam was built by the World Bank in the 1970s. And just to refurbish that rotor, because the Congo River is coming through that rotor, there’s about 95 tons of copper in that rotor. So you need copper to make electrical energy. This is 178 megawatts of hydroelectric power.

And why we love the Congo, why the Congo is the best place to mine copper in the world, it’s so obvious. It’s so simple. I can explain this to you, and nobody can argue. First of all, there’s no ice or snow. And secondly, it’s flat. We’re not up at the mountain somewhere in vertical real estate. And it’s warm year-round, but not too hot. And we don’t even look at copper less than a 2% cutoff grade. But in fifty or a hundred years from now, we’ll look at all the lower grade stuff. And we have hydroelectricity, and we have sunshine.

This is our phase one solar field. It delivers 60 megawatts of power twenty-four hours a day because we have batteries. The problem with solar is the damn sun doesn’t shine all the time. But we’re near the equator here, so we get a good six hours of really strong sun. And we’re gonna double this now to 120 megawatts and then 180 megawatts. And with the Strait of Hormuz closed, and only God knows how long the Strait of Hormuz will be closed, she might change her mind. But we don’t know how long the Strait of Hormuz will be closed. Diesel prices are going up, up, up, up, up, up. And you have to burn some diesel in the mining industry unless you go 100% electric. So the idea here is we can generate this solar power in the middle of nowhere and get it down to about 12, 13 cents a kilowatt hour. If we have to bring diesel fuel into the central part of the Congo, probably about 40 cents a kilowatt hour. So this solar is cheaper than the diesel, and this is just backup power for the hydroelectricity.

So going back to first principles, no ice, no snow, flat ground, hydroelectric power, high grade, international airport to the market. Nothing can compete for a copper metal on planet Earth with this unless you have enough gold with your copper to recover all your costs. Because with the magic of US GAAP or our accounting principles, you can report negative copper production costs if you have enough gold. And I would wish that we had gold here, but we don’t. But those are just the batteries. You can see the solar field in the background.

So this is extremely green mine. The amount of global warming gas generated per unit of electrical energy is lower than any copper mine on planet Earth. And as the pendulum swings and people get interested in the fact that last year was the warmest year ever recorded on this planet in 132 years, we think clean copper will attract a higher price. And we think dirty copper, where you’re burning coal to make the copper, will probably attract a lower price.

Now, when we’re looking at what we need, I’ve listed all these critical materials on the left and all the junk we keep on buying. But if you’re interested in renewables or electric mobility or any form of the generation of energy, the conductance of electricity or the use of that, or of course, IT, everything requires these metals. And if you can go to Africa and mine copper and you have the best in class people who know how to do that, then you can mine all this other stuff because it doesn’t really make a big difference whether you’re mining copper or gold. The skill set is the value of the people. And what our industry is lacking is enough young people in mining. Now that we have women coming in mining, we potentially double the labor force. But unfortunately, all the kids went into internet and broadband and viral technologies. We only graduated about 80 mining engineers in the United States last year, China about 3,200. So if you want to build all this stuff in the middle, somebody’s gonna have to go out here and mine all that stuff on the left. And this fact is becoming weaponized as we balkanize the world economy.

This is a good example. Is there a soundtrack with this? “The real advantage is sending robots where people face the greatest risk.” Louder. “That’s why we are building an army of robots. Just imagine, robotic systems control the battlefield twenty-four seven. Sensors detect movement, sound, and the smallest changes in the environment. Different types of robots respond to threats before they reach people. Robots intercept the enemy, defend against attacks, destroy targets, move on to enemy positions first. People control the systems from a safe distance and enter the cleared position only when it is safe. Yeah, it sounds like the war of the future, but we are already there, and we are starting to build the army of robots today. For a long time, strength belonged to those with more people. Today, strength belongs to those who know how to save lives.”

Those dogs are particularly frightening because when we had Terminator, it was a humanoid robot. But those dogs can really, really move fast. They have a low center of gravity. You put a thermal detector on that dog and that camera can identify my old friend Terry, for example, and go after him. And you put a machine gun on that dog, it’s terrifying. And all of the actuators to make that robotic dog or to make Arnold Schwarzenegger coming as a humanoid robot, all of those actuators require critical raw materials to mimic muscle. And if we don’t have the materials to make those actuators, then somebody else is gonna make 20 billion robots a year, and we’re not gonna have any. And yes, they could walk all the way to Colorado.

So this is terribly real. Warfare as we knew it has completely, utterly, and totally changed. In the Ukraine conflict, nobody’s using tanks anymore because a $12 drone just sees the heat signature and kills it, and that means that AI, artificial intelligence, is purely, at first and foremost, a military technology. It’s extremely important you understand what I just said. Elon’s low Earth orbiting satellites, Starlink, have twenty-seven millionth of a second latency for the signal to go up and come down. If my drone, directed by AI coming after my friend Terry, is a millionth of a second faster than my opponent’s drone, he dies, I don’t. Now, in the financial world, a lot of people put trading computers right next to the COMEX or the NYMEX so that they could trade commodities a billionth of a second faster in the financial world. Why are we still running net present value models on mining when if you don’t have the metals to defend yourself, you are dead, you die? We have to take these MPV models and just throw them out the window. They’re ridiculous because of the current situation.

So I’ve been trying to explain to people of the example of one critical metal on that list I had on the left, because most of these metals you guys have never heard of. Most bankers and analysts, they haven’t got a clue about these metals, but I’m picking scandium because it’s the only metal that was named after Scandinavia. There’s another one called germanium that was named after Germany. There’s another one called indium. India finally got an element. But it’s these elements you’ve never heard of that are gonna be much more valuable than gold.

They used to call this the Gold Show here in Colorado. How stupid is that? We used to put gold in our teeth. Who the hell puts gold in their teeth? You look like a Russian mafia with gold in your tooth. We don’t need gold for that purpose, and there is no fundamental disruptive technological requirement for gold. But scandium, this little puppy, is up 50X in share price in the last two years, and up 5X in share price in the last year. This is the best performing mining equity in the world. Now the question becomes why? What should this conference focus on to attract intelligent people to stimulate their hand-to-wallet reflex?

So the problem is that we have only so much electromagnetic spectrum. I want everybody in this room to pay attention, ’cause I flew a long way here to teach you something you might not know. Originally, we had 1G wireless, 2G wireless, 3G wireless, 4G wireless. When you had your original Nokia hand phone, that was 1G. And when Steve came up with the first Apple one phone, we’re at about 2G. And the problem is that as we get more and more information on a given amount of electromagnetic spectrum, it’s like real estate, we have to cut it into finer and finer pieces. And right now, Apple computer, if you have an iPhone, is running on 5.5G, otherwise known as 5G plus. It’s a spectrum allocation midway between 5G and 6G. And there’s at least fifty little pieces of semiconductor in your Apple phone that needs scandium. Without scandium, you’re not able to call your girlfriends, do a WhatsApp, do a tweet. It’s just doesn’t happen, guys. But we are now moving to 6G. And what the scandium does is it allows us to discriminate ever narrower slices of spectrum, and all military equipment is going to 6G.

When that drone is coming after my friend Terry to put him out of business, it’s gonna run on 6G wireless. All military equipment is gonna run on 6G. And you can see it there, aluminum scandium nitride. Down there, lower right-hand corner. It’s right here. Aluminum scandium nitride. And now, Jensen Huang is running on gallium nitride. If you want an AI chip from Nvidia, you need gallium. So gallium, super important. Scandium, super important.

Now, Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary of the United States of America, just was in meetings with his Chinese counterparts last week. And they have these amazing poker game going on between America and China about these critical raw materials. I was quoted in the media telling this anecdote. I cannot say where I learned it, but the Chinese, in a previous encounter, came on pretty hot and heavy and started bitching and saying, “You haven’t sold us the General Electric aircraft engines that you promised us for our Boeing aircraft fleet.” You’re bad people. You didn’t sell us those aircraft engines. We need those spare engines. We bought a lot of Boeings. And the Americans said, “Yes, but you haven’t sold us the metals we need to make those aircraft engines.” And that’s where we are right now.

You’re all Chinese over there, and you’re all Americans over there. We’ve just divided you nicely. The Chinese people are not the natural enemy of the American people. If somebody’s trying to sell you the story that because somebody’s Chinese, they’re your enemy, that’s bullshit. That’s not true. We’re all human beings. But the Communist Party of China may very well be your enemy, and there’s a big distinction here because AI for China will serve the Communist Party of China. I’m not sure what AI will do for the average American, but I can assure you AI’s moving forward because it’s a military technology. And as the President of the United States said, if we don’t develop this technology, we’re caught in this conundrum that the other party will. And all of this is driven by these rare, thinly traded, must-have metals that you’ve never heard of.

So scandium is used, for example, General Atomic, that Raptor drone, where there’s a guy sitting in Nevada running a drone, blasting people in Afghanistan. They wanna make that out of scandium-aluminum alloy. This is a 3D-printed piece of scandium-aluminum alloy. I can’t give it to all of you, but it’s as light as cardboard. It’s five times as strong as steel. And you only have to add 0.25% scandium, which enables you to 3D print the aluminum, and the lightweighting of everything is a critical theme in everything. Lighter cars, lighter drones. Elon is printing 3D rocket pieces, and you can 3D aluminum by adding scandium.

So everybody sees this simplification, generator one, two, three of the Raptor engine. Actually, that Raptor is just as complicated as the first one, but a lot of the complication is hidden inside in the 3D printing of the rocket engine itself. So the combination of accretive manufacturing and the ability to use 3D printing with scandium revolutionizes aluminum. And of course, that cruise missile goes further if it’s lighter and stronger. That ship goes further and lighter if it’s stronger. And if you wanna 3D print this very important metal, you can’t do it without the scandium, guys. Now then you can make an incredible set of golf clubs, an unbelievable tennis racket. You can make a Porsche out of this alloy, and this stuff is really valuable.

The Department of Defense bought five tons of scandium from Rio Tinto for $6,250,000 a ton. $6,250,000 a ton. Copper’s about $14,000 a ton. So that means a long wide bed pickup filled with scandium metal is worth about $30 million, $35 million. You just have to give you a feeling for what one of these critical materials is worth.

Now, in quantum computing, it turns out that aluminum scandium nitride represents one of the most effective materials to control light. And with light control, if we get quantum, I hope and pray all of you blow out your bitcoins today. Get rid of them. Because when they show you a bitcoin, they’re showing you a coin with a B on it. Looks like it’s made out of metal. But all a bitcoin really is, is a little bit of electromagnetic energy. It’s invisible. And if we have quantum computing, they’re just gonna tear those things apart. They’re not even gonna exist anymore. They’re all gonna be stolen. They’re gonna be gone.

And if we have electromagnetic warfare where a satellite or a rocket comes over your city, and then just a little burst of electromagnetic energy, an EMP weapon comes down, everything electrical is gone. There’s no internet. There’s no broadband. There’s no wireless. Your little bit of electromagnetic energy is gone. You’re not gonna trade it to anybody for anything. So at least gold, if you can remember what tree you buried it under, you could dig up that gold when the Russians get to Colorado and trade it for a loaf of bread if they don’t kill you for it. There actually is no safety in this. It’s all bullshit. We need to prevent war.

But if we have an adversary that has all these metals and we don’t, we get into a situation of imbalance where it looks like our society is in danger of losing its sovereignty. And in this discussion that happened with President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump last week, we only got a 60-day extension on a period of time where China’s threatening to cut off all those metals I showed you on that left side.

So if you bought this stock a year ago, you’re up 500%. I guess that’s better than leaving your money in the bank, and up about fiftyfold in the last two years. So to quote Crocodile Dundee, “That’s not a mining share, mate. That’s a mining share.” That’s the best performing mining share in the world. And I didn’t have to go around doing dog and pony shows or going up and down elevators talking to hedge funds named after Greek gods or go to conferences. It did that on its own for a very real reason. That scandium metal is orders of magnitude more important than gold. Do you understand what I just said? Is there anything I just said that you can’t understand? We’ve been in this mining industry for 45 years.

So what has China done? China has said they’re now restricting the sale of gallium, germanium, antimony, scandium, tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, indium, molybdenum, and many others. And under the current rule, if you wanna buy scandium from China, or you wanna buy tellurium from China, you have to give your plans, your blueprints, to the Chinese Military Commission. And then they look at your plans, and they can deny you the sale of those metals for any reason or no reason. And the number of sales that have occurred are just falling off a cliff to our society. I hope you understand what I just said. Who is going to give their plans for their next product from this country to the Chinese Military Commission? Would anybody raise their hand and volunteer to do that?

And so when we look at our dependency, 100% of our arsenic, cesium, fluorspar, gallium, graphite, indium, manganese, niobium, rubidium, scandium, tantalum, titanium, bismuth, they’re all… That’s 100% dependence on China, but it’s pretty bad when you’re at 85%. So the ones in red are the rarest of the rare, the most important of the important, and the vast unwashed masses out there have no idea what I’m talking about to you, yet. This is very early. Very, very early. We are in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and then the Himalayas. This issue is not going away anytime soon because we lost our sovereignty.

We haven’t been mining in this country for 30 or 40 years. I had to go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo or to Mongolia or somewhere in Russia or all over the place. The hardest place to mine was right here because we had too many lawyers. You all know that 50,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea is a good start. And mining was a cardinal sin. But now people are gonna start looking at this a little bit differently. And in my portfolio, I happen to be working on those. Now, we can’t do everything, but we’re solving 100% of the scandium problem. And we’re working on platinum and palladium and nickel and zinc and germanium and gallium. And we’re prepared to do others, but no one mining company or group can solve this issue at the scale of the American economy. The problem is solving this at the massive, massive scale of the economy.

Now, we went to Microsoft and just looked at a little baby server rack in Chicago. This is a 50-megawatt little baby data center. This is a toy. And to build that data center, we needed, in every server now, every server rack, copper, barium, antimony, titanium, indium, silver, tungsten, gold, gallium, tantalum, rare earths, which are not rare and not earths, niobium, and palladium. Did you know that you can’t make a server without palladium or gold or tungsten or gallium? Nobody’s telling you this. It’s not just the copper to generate the electrical energy and transmit it and put it in the data center, but that if you have an AI girlfriend or a boyfriend, very attractive, that girlfriend or boyfriend is made out of those metals. If you have a beautiful female or male robot, anthropomorphic, to make love with, that robot is made out of these metals. And this is what wars are going to be fought on, and this is what wars are being fought on today.

So I want to show you Ivanhoe Mines because we have the largest precious metals mine in the world, and it’s started. It only took us 34 years, guys. And I’m gonna show you a little film about what it actually takes to build a tier one mine. Hopefully, there’s a film. Yeah. Turn it up enough to hear it, but not too much. Turn it up a little bit. Let’s hear it. [upbeat music]

This is about 160 million ounces of precious metal, and then we just got tired of drilling because if we mine a million ounces a year, that’s 160 years. So we’ve only drilled 10% of this system. There’s no shortage of metal. The world’s largest platinum mine is just north of us, but this mine has a lot of nickel and copper in it, as well as gold and rhodium. And gold’s okay, but rhodium is more than twice as valuable as gold. So we started with nothing here in, we went back to 1998. This is 2026, 28 years of this evolution for this one mine. So it’s about as thick as an eight-story building. It’s flat, and it’s about seven miles long. And we just stopped drilling it at 170 million ounces.

And that’s a picture of me when I was a lot younger in 2011, when the Japanese government invested almost $300 million to buy 10%. We didn’t even have a mining license. And South Africa’s coming back in style now. Their GDP’s been doing quite well. Their bonds are trading up. And here we are. You can see our number one headframe in the background. We’re mining under all these people. We sold 26% of the mine to about 150,000 people, 20 host communities. We lent them the money to buy the interest.

And after we drilled a half a million meters, we had already drilled out 59 million ounces. And we were wondering, how far should we keep going? And then we had to start sinking a shaft. And our main working level is at 750 meters, so that’s about two Eiffel Towers deep, just to get a scale. And the ore body would be six times, eight times thicker than the ceiling of this room. Then we got down there, and then we signed agreements with the local government. We started training people, schools, hospitals, free wireless, childhood education, agricultural development, because if you don’t do this around a mine, you don’t have a social license to mine. This is the software.

And finally shaft number one got completed. And shaft number one enables us to get underground, develop shafts number two and three and four. Feasibility study says next year we start producing half a million ounces a year, but lots of nickel and copper as byproduct. So the precious metal production cost is the lowest in the platinum palladium industry. There’s Marna, our CEO. That’s where we started shaft number two. And here goes shaft number two, the largest shaft on the African continent. It’s a big one. It has some of the world’s largest electrical motors, and here comes the baby concentrator. The baby concentrator is running today. We call this… It’s a phase one baby. She’s been built. Here comes phase three and number two coming. When we’ve got all three running, it’s a million ounces a year of platinum, palladium, rhodium, gold, and the nickel and copper to pay for those precious metals. The lowest cost, largest precious metals mine in the world.

And I can assure you, if you buy Ivanhoe Mines today at the current price, you’re getting this for free. It only took us 35 years to get here. Who in their right mind goes out and works for 30 or 35 years for a project like this? You have to be completely crazy to do this kind of thing. So there’s Cyril Ramaphosa. There we are with Cyril. He’s the president opening the country. We got the ribbon. There’s my son. And we’re gonna completely revolutionize the industry. We have an all-electrical mining fleet. We have women driving the equipment, and we’re developing new technologies to train these kids.

And we know how to mine in Africa. And if we can’t mine in Africa, we’re screwed. ’Cause I can’t mine in Russia. I can’t mine in China. I can’t mine in Iran. Where the hell do you think the metal is on this planet? It’s Africa. That’s where the metal is. 25% of the miners are women. That’s amazing. We’re trying to get it to 50%, and the women are better miners than the men. That’s a long story, but at least they don’t drink, and they have children. They’re much more responsible. And we have great relations with our host community. They’re protecting us. This is the safest place I’ve ever seen to mine.

Please raise your hand if you’ve been to Platreef. It’s pretty good. There’s about 20 people here. Please come and take a look because this is the largest precious metals development in the world. And because it’s flat, if we go to Qatar or Saudi Arabia, they give us the money, we could build ten more shafts. We could do five million ounces a year. There’s no resource limitation here. But it took 34 years of my life, and if I look back at that to the beginning, and I thought about it, I probably never would have done it, guys. ’Cause if you’re smart, you just write an app. You write an app and sell it to Mark Zuckerberg for $4 billion. This is a stupid and difficult way to make a few bucks.

Now, when we look at the basket price of all these metals, we’re right here. When you add up the gold, the platinum, palladium, the nickel, we’re near the all-time high for the value of these metals. But when we started 25 or 30 years ago, we had no idea what the metal price was gonna be, and that’s the problem with the mining industry. You have to commit to five, ten, fifteen, twenty years of misery, and you have no idea what the price is gonna be after all that effort. But fortunately, this is by far the lowest cost producer in the world of these metals, the bottom of tier one. So this is a thinking person’s precious metal equity, Ivanhoe Mines. We’re not just a copper mining company in the Congo. We have the largest, richest, biggest, best precious metals mine in the world, reaching full production about a year and two months from now.

Now, we’ve been getting a lot of help from Uncle Sam. Sunrise, the scandium company I told you, has a $400 million conditional loan from the United States Department of War because that scandium is what’s gonna keep you alive. And Ex-Im Bank has offered $1.1 billion of long-term debt financing for a copper mine that we’re building on private land in Arizona. And the CHIPS Act, which was passed both by Democrats and Republicans during the Biden administration, is investing $250 million in award for us to develop new semiconductors to completely change the way we explore for metals, crush and grind the rock to get the metals out. We’re gonna completely change the mining industry, ’cause without that last one, we’re gonna fail.

So we’ve been spending a lot of time with the United States government. We had a roundtable. There’s Donald Trump, and there’s Secretary Rubio and Howard Lutnick and myself. And this was the first time the President of the United States talked to the world about mining since the days of President Polk. It was around 1908 to 1910, about 120 years ago. This was the first president to talk publicly about mining in 120 years in the United States. And he mentioned our copper mine in Arizona ’cause we’re on private land. As you know, Resolution has had a problem with the San Juan Apache Nation, and they’ve been trying to get a permit for 35 years. But we’re on private land. We don’t need a smelter. We’re gonna produce LME Grade A cathode.

And if there’s any equity that is the next Sunrise Metals, it’s Ivanhoe Electric. And that’s because we’re running massive exploration programs with the best exploration team in the world and the best technology we’ve ever had for exploration. So we’re working in the United States. We have a partnership with BHP. BHP is still the largest non-Chinese mining company. They used to be the biggest mining company in the world until Zijin came along and passed them in market cap. But in our case, BHP puts up all of the money. We allow our technology to be used and we’re 50-50. We have no risk. We own the technology and we’re exploring in Arizona, in Utah, in Nevada, in Montana. And we’re doing the same thing in Saudi Arabia in a 50-50 partnership with the Saudi government, and we’re doing it again in Chile with the largest landowner in Chile, Soquimich, which is the world’s largest lithium producer.

Now, if you can keep on going to casino and it’s a 50-50 bet, heads I win, tails I don’t lose, you eventually become the world’s biggest mining company. Nobody has a joint venture with BHP or the Saudi government or the Chileans where the risk is taken by the partner and we keep half. I hope you understand what I just said. I don’t understand why the analysts haven’t explained this to you, that mineral exploration is a risky business and you wanna overcome the odds. This is the best exploration team in the world with the world’s best exploration technology. So let’s look at this and turn it up and I’ll catch my breath.

In a 50-50 joint venture with the Saudi Arabian Mining Company. This is Saudi Arabia. Turn it up. Together, we are leveraging our world-class technology platform in Saudi Arabia to explore for electric metals including copper, gold, and silver across nearly 50,000 square kilometers of the Saudi Arabian Shield. We are active across a diverse set of geological environments. These include volcanic-hosted massive sulfide systems at Wadi Bida, iron oxide copper gold systems at Mesayna, porphyries at Dhran, epithermal gold and base metal systems near Mahad ad Dahab, and sediment-hosted copper in the platform. Opportunities for the joint venture are constantly being evaluated, with a wide variety of deposit styles present in the Kingdom for us to explore. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has rapidly become one of the world’s most active frontiers for mineral exploration, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this opportunity alongside Ma’aden.

Why do we love Saudi Arabia? There’s no ice or snow, and the diesel fuel is super cheap, and there’s great infrastructure, and we have a ten-year tax holiday on any mine we find, and the government will provide 90% of the financing. So that’s a great place to go mining. We pick our spots. Now, when we go to China, I’ve asked you to buy Ivanhoe Electric. I made it pretty clear, didn’t I? There’s a lot of discoveries coming in Ivanhoe Electric in its work. It’s got the best exploration team in the world and the best technology in the world. I rarely ask a friend to buy an equity. I’m too old for this. But don’t say I didn’t warn you about Ivanhoe Electric this year. It’s on the New York Stock Exchange.

Now, when we look at China, this is the power generation in China. It’s just going straight up. And look at USA and Europe. We don’t have the power for AI. China has the power for AI. And people are getting cranky in the United States about these data centers because they’re pushing up electricity prices. Three days ago, Oracle declared force majeure on a data center being built in New Mexico. They lost about $100 billion in market cap a few days. So we need a lot more electricity if we’re gonna have AI, and I remind you, this is a military technology.

So my main concern now is iPulse. That’s a picture of the Z machine at Sandia National Labs. That’s the world’s most powerful machine. In the history of our species, that’s the most powerful machine ever built by human beings. That machine radiates 80 terawatts of power. You see that green bar that’s horizontal, and this is the power in all the world’s power plants combined. So today we’re about here. The world is producing about eight terawatts of power. That’s all the nuclear power plants, all the solar, wind, coal. So this machine is incredible. It’s been used for strategic weaponry purposes. It mimics the conditions at the center of the sun. It creates an atmosphere of up to 100 million atmospheres and 12,000 to 13,000 degrees centigrade, which is what initiates a fusion reaction in the center of the sun. And the American government built that, and our chief scientist, Rick Spielman, was the chief scientist who built that machine.

And we’re taking that level of science and technology to completely change the mining industry. We have BHP as a shareholder, Rio Tinto, Newmont Mining, AngloTech Corporation, Ivanhoe Mines, and Codelco. Those of you that are not on that list, I will give you a crying towel. You’re toast. You won’t be able to do this the old-fashioned way. Here’s a little film explaining it, short version.

[instrumental music] iPulse has developed game-changing technology, and game-changing being hugely disruptive to a whole range of industries. We’re talking here about pulsed electrical power, a greener, more efficient, more powerful way to use electrical energy. If you’re one of the lucky ones we invite to our labs, it’s better than going to Disneyland. Pulsed power is not a new idea. The applications are new.

To discharge energy quickly in somewhere between 50 billionths of a second to 50 millionths of a second, and you get peak powers from megawatts to terawatts. That’s pulsed power. We can crack, fracture, drill, and mine with that energy. So you can directly experience the difference between power and energy. We just take that energy from your iPhone battery, and we liberate that amount of energy for a few millionths of a second into a metric ton of water. 2,200 pounds of water in a steel tank that weighs about 700 pounds, which creates a vacuum as the bubble collapses, and it lifts that whole tank. So it can be shocking the amount of work. We just want people to feel how much power is liberated from that tiny amount of electrical energy.

So simply put, High Rocks breaks rock. What you’re seeing behind me is ore from the Escondida mine in Chile. And as that falls through the column, we use our proprietary pulse power technology to burst the rock from the inside. Conventionally, we break rock by crushing it from the outside. When you burst it from the inside using a tensile force, you can use up to 80% less energy than conventional grinding technologies. And so we’re able to take these large pieces of rock down to a very fine powder, but we do so very efficiently.

Do you have a chain of events? The primary crusher, the SAG mill, the ball mill. What we want to do is take away that SAG mill and that ball mill, bye-bye. It’s a huge savings in electricity and a much lower carbon footprint. By breaking rock along mineralogical boundaries, we’re able to unlock more of the valuable metals that are trapped inside. We’re seeing this translate into up to 5% higher metal recoveries, which is incredibly valuable, both in terms of the companies that are involved, as well as the new metals that are needed for the energy transition.

iPulse, High Rocks, iMining, these are all examples of breakthrough technologies. They have the potential to radically transform the way that we do almost the act of mining and processing. It’s going to reduce CO2 emissions, and it’s going to make the cost of mining lower, which means that we’ll be able to mine these lower-grade ores more economically and with less environmental impact than would otherwise be the case.

I think this is gonna be tremendous impact and change in the mining industry. Safety benefits, the decarb benefits, obviously, the increased production and the bottom line benefits. It’s a quadruple win on all dimensions. It is technology that I think will be an important part of the change in our industry in terms of how we break through with some techniques that we’ve used for 100, 150 years. For whatever reasons, we have some difficulties as an industry to innovate. And here, I think we have a good example that innovation is possible.

This is almost like the holy grail that the mining industry has been searching for for decades. The technologies that iPulse brings will help mining industry become part of the solution rather than being part of the problem. There’s hope. There’s hope if we use the best of our innovative technology.

And of course, our ultimate dream is to provide power for these data centers of the mining industry with a new way to do geothermal power. Right now, if you wanna buy a natural gas-powered turbine for a data center, the wait is five to seven years for these hyperscalers. But the contracts don’t guarantee delivery. They just say best efforts because the critical materials to make the turbines come from China, and China is threatening to cut off those materials on the 10th of January, 2027. And we need to increase America’s power output by 25% by tomorrow morning in 2030. So it’s a really weird situation we find ourselves in.

When we look at the map of the United States, all that heat, America has more geothermal potential than any nation on Earth. Just that little pink spot in Virginia is enough to generate 20 gigawatts of power. But we need disruptive technology to do this. We need to have closed loops like you see on the right, and we think we know how to do this very quickly. We’ve been funded by the Japanese government, the French government, and now we’ve received mother’s milk from Uncle Sam. And the core technology we need to crush and grind rock and drill is the same technology we need to go geothermal.

So in the future, we’re just gonna go down here under our feet, tap the heat that Mother Earth gave us, ’cause the center of the Earth is a naturally occurring nuclear power plant. There’s enough uranium in the core of the Earth and enough pressure that we get a naturally occurring fission reaction, and that’s where the heat is from under the Earth. In the days of the Old Testament, when they talked about Satan down there in a red suit with those horns, everybody knew it was hot down there. The Jews agreed, Muslims agreed, Christians agreed, it’s hot down there. So all we have to do is revolutionize geothermal power, and we’ll have enough electricity for everybody on this planet with no global warming effects.

And we’re doing this now. We have a tool that’s drilling through rock about three times faster than anybody has ever drilled through rock, and the life of the drill bit is about six times faster, so you don’t have to pull all that drill steel out and replace the drill bit. So if we can drill cheaply enough, we can also drill through hot rock and liberate endless electrical power for the human race. It’s a dirty job. Somebody has to do it. It’s easier than putting a man on the moon. You know when we put a man on the moon, some people think we didn’t really do it, but we did it with slide rules? So this is much easier than putting a man on the moon. It’s right underneath your feet.

You can follow me on X ’cause I’m tweeting a lot, @Robert_Ivanhoe. You can find all of these companies. If there’s anybody in this audience that wants to help us change the world and make it better, the miners are now the community that needs to find a way to sustainably mine this metal and think a little bit broader than gold to protect your pocketbook, please. Think about other metals, because you can mine gold, you can mine other things, and we don’t mine gold with our copper. We love it with our copper. We’re not against gold.

What we wanna do now is try to find a way to talk to our Chinese friends, and their Russian allies, and their Iranian ally, and their North Korean fat boy ally in a way that we don’t have a hold on each other, that we haven’t lost our sovereignty. And that way we can play rugby by a set of rules where we break each other’s collarbones, but we don’t kill our kids. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? And it’s amazing that the world got to this point that it’s completely reliant about American ingenuity and technology and the miners to solve this problem.

So thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell you this shit when I’m 76 years old. Please help us out. God bless America, and let’s try to help our country to innovate its way out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves into. Thank you. [audience applauding] Was that good? Thank you. Good. All right. Thank you, folks. There is—