The Coming Commodity Supercycle Is the Biggest Business Opportunity Founders Are Ignoring

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For most of the last decade, you could build something valuable without ever thinking about the physical world.

The formula for building a large company was essentially: find a market, write code, raise money, grow fast. The physical world was someone else’s problem. That era is not completely over, but the ground has shifted in ways that most founders have not fully absorbed yet.

The constraint now is not code or capital. It is materials. And the businesses that understand this early — and build around it — are going to have an enormous advantage over the ones still optimizing for a world that no longer exists.

What a commodity supercycle actually means

Commodity supercycles happen when a structural shift in the global economy drives demand for raw materials higher for a sustained period — not a quarter or two, but years or decades — while supply struggles to keep up.

We have been through a few of these. The industrialization of China drove the last major supercycle in the 2000s. Before that, post-war reconstruction drove one in the 1950s and 1960s.What is happening now is potentially larger than either of those, because the demand is coming from multiple directions at once.

AI infrastructure is consuming copper, rare earths and energy at a scale that was not in anyone’s models five years ago. US data center construction hit an annualized $50 billion in April 2026. Electrification of transport is driving demand for copper, lithium, cobalt and nickel. Grid upgrades to support that electrification require additional copper at an enormous scale.

Defense spending is rising across NATO and allied nations, and modern weapons systems are mineral-intensive in ways that conventional platforms never were. Reindustrialization — the US and Europe bringing manufacturing capacity back onshore — requires the same materials, in large quantities, domestically.

All of this is hitting a supply side that is structurally unable to respond quickly. A copper mine takes 16 to 17 years from discovery to first production on average. Permitting timelines in Western jurisdictions have not shortened. Exploration budgets fell to a record low as a share of global mining spend in 2025. The IEA has warned of a potential 30% copper supply deficit by 2035.

This is not a temporary imbalance; instead, it is a structural one. And structural imbalances create business opportunities.

The opportunity is not in mining for most founders

Here is where most founders get this wrong when they first start thinking about commodities.The opportunity is not in digging holes in the ground. Mining is capital-intensive, technically complex, heavily regulated and takes a long time to generate returns. It is not a startup business.The opportunity is in everything around it.

Think about what a prolonged period of commodity scarcity actually requires. It requires better data — on where materials are, what projects are in the pipeline, which supply chains are fragile and which are resilient. It requires better logistics — tracking physical materials through complex multi-jurisdiction supply chains with the kind of visibility that currently does not exist.

It requires better financing — new structures that connect capital to physical assets more efficiently than the existing futures markets and equity structures allow. It requires processing and refining capacity in Western jurisdictions, which is almost entirely absent today. It requires software that helps manufacturers understand their own commodity exposure before a disruption forces them to.

None of these are mining businesses. All of them are enabled by a world in which commodities are scarce, expensive and geopolitically complex. The picks-and-shovels layer of the commodity supercycle is largely unbuilt. That is where founders should be looking.

The window for building in this space is open right now for a specific reason: the big players are not moving fast enough.

Major mining companies are focused on their existing operations. Financial institutions are still figuring out how to price geopolitical risk in commodity markets. The technology sector has only recently started to realize it has a physical supply chain problem. Governments are throwing money at domestic supply chain resilience but mostly lack the operational expertise to deploy it effectively.

That gap — between the urgency of the problem and the speed of the institutional response — is where startups live.

The founders who built around the last major supply chain disruption, COVID, created some of the most valuable logistics and supply chain companies of the past five years. The disruption playing out in commodity markets right now is slower-moving but larger in scale, and it is going to run for longer.

If you are a founder thinking about this space, a few things are worth keeping in mind.Start with a specific commodity and a specific problem in its supply chain. Broad commodity plays are hard to execute. Specific, acute problems — a particular processing bottleneck, a specific visibility gap in a supply chain, a financing structure that does not currently exist for a certain class of assets — are where you find real traction.

Get close to the physical world. The founders who are going to win in this space will understand how mining actually works, what offtake agreements are and how materials move from mine to manufacturer. That knowledge is not widely distributed in the startup community, which means it is an edge.

Do not wait for the market to validate the opportunity before you start. By the time commodity scarcity is front-page news for founders, the early movers will already be well-established. The best time to build in this space is before it is obvious.

The physical world is back. The founders who treat that as a problem are going to struggle. The ones who treat it as an opportunity are going to build something significant.

Anthony Milewski • Founder of The Oregon Group