As copper trades near record highs driven by AI data center demand, Ferrari and BMW have quietly begun rewiring their electric and hybrid vehicles with aluminium, raising real questions about the commodity thesis that has powered copper's rally.
The switch sounds like a procurement footnote. It isn't. Ferrari introduced aluminium power cables in its 296 hybrid sports car, then extended the same approach to the Luce, its first production electric vehicle launched this year. BMW has been rolling aluminium conductors through both high- and low-voltage systems since it launched its 6th-generation eDrive platform, following earlier experiments with the material that stretch back to its 1 Series in 2011. Tesla wired its Model Y with aluminium back in 2019 and later its Cybertruck. Chinese EV makers have been doing it for cost reasons for years. What's new in 2026 is that the practice has reached Ferrari, a brand not historically known for cutting corners on materials.
The economics are brutal for copper right now. LME copper surged to record highs near $14,500 per metric tonne in early 2026, and the copper-to-aluminium price ratio hit 4.3 in January, according to market data. Aluminium, by contrast, trades around $3,100 per tonne. That's roughly one-quarter the price. Aluminium is also about 3.3 times lighter than copper, which matters enormously in EV engineering where every kilogram shaved off the wiring harness translates to more range. Ferrari's engineers have reported weight savings of 15 to 20 percent on total wiring by making the switch. For a company whose entire engineering philosophy centers on the power-to-weight ratio, that figure carries its own argument.
Here's the thing: copper's 2025-2026 bull run was built on a specific narrative. AI data centers need enormous amounts of copper for busbars, power distribution, and cabling. A single large-scale hyperscale facility can consume hundreds of tonnes. S&P Global's January 2026 report on copper in the AI era estimated that global data center copper consumption would reach 710,000 tonnes by 2026, up from 467,000 tonnes in 2023. That's real demand, and it isn't going away. Copper remains genuinely difficult to replace inside a data center at short distances, where its conductivity advantage over aluminium is most pronounced.
But EVs are a different story. The per-vehicle copper content in an electric car is substantially higher than in an internal combustion engine vehicle, running around 83 kg on average versus roughly 23 kg in a conventional car. Industry analysts from Benchmark Minerals have noted that thrifting and material substitution could reduce per-vehicle copper requirements by around 38 kg by 2030. If aluminium adoption accelerates across Ferrari, BMW, Chinese manufacturers, and eventually the broader supply chain, that's a meaningful pull on one of the demand pillars that copper bulls have been counting on.
Goldman Sachs has already flagged that copper prices are likely to decline somewhat from their record highs, and the automaker substitution trend is part of that calculus. The data center thesis remains intact. The EV thesis is wobbling.
For component suppliers, the shift creates real pressure. Wiring harness manufacturers who have tooled up for copper are now watching their largest customers redesign the harness itself. Aluminium requires different connectors, different crimping techniques, and different corrosion management since the metal oxidizes more readily than copper. None of that is insurmountable, and BMW's decade-long experience proves it, but it does mean suppliers face retooling costs at exactly the moment when EV demand growth has slowed from its early peak pace.
Ferrari's decision carries an outsized signal precisely because of who Ferrari is. When Tesla does something, it gets credited to Silicon Valley disruption. When a Chinese startup does it, it gets attributed to cost pressure. When Ferrari, which charges north of $500,000 for the Luce and built its reputation on no-compromise engineering, makes the same call, it reads differently. It reads like the engineering community has made up its mind.
Frankly, the copper-as-AI-trade thesis was always a blended story: data centers pulling from one direction, EVs from another, green energy infrastructure from a third. The AI demand side remains genuinely compelling. But the EV side of that equation is now being revised in real time by the same carmakers who were supposed to be among copper's best customers. Whether that substitution moves fast enough to cap copper's rally depends on how quickly the rest of the industry follows Ferrari and BMW's lead. The answer, based on what Chinese manufacturers have already been doing for years, is probably faster than the copper market currently expects.
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