Mining tycoon Robert Friedland said he’s fielding “unconventional interest,” including from US Big Tech, in Ivanhoe Mines’ fast-expanding copper exploration project in the Democratic Republic of Congo, highlighting growing anxieties about future supplies of the key metal.

Friedland founded and chairs Toronto-listed Ivanhoe, which on Tuesday announced that a drilling campaign has increased the mineral resource estimate at its Western Forelands venture by 30% to 12-million tons of contained copper. The company already co-owns a nearby operation in the Central African nation which has become one of the world’s largest producers of the metal.

“We are constantly in discussion with sovereign wealth funds and major mining companies,” Friedland said in an interview. “And now most recently, Silicon Valley hyperscalers are very worried about where metal is going to come from. We’re seeing unconventional interest in mining that I never saw in my 45 years in mining.”

So-called hyperscalers like Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc’s Google are investing in data centers at an unprecedented scale to power the artificial-intelligence buildout.

Without naming which tech giants he’s spoken to about Western Forelands, Friedland said talks have touched both on securing metal offtake and financing mine construction. “There’s a very real concern now that these multitrillion-dollar enterprises suddenly want to have their own sort of dedicated resource base in a balkanizing world economy,” he said.

Copper has hit all-time highs this week, trading above $14 500/t, reflecting tight near-term supplies and expectations that the US will tariff imports of refined metal. The rally is supported by a long-term mismatch between constrained mine supply and surging demand forecasts driven by data centers, renewable energy and power grids.

Another company chaired by Friedland, who has repeatedly commended the Trump administration’s focus on mineral supply chains, is also working on a $1.1-billion debt package from the US Export-Import Bank to develop a copper project in Arizona.

The discovery at Western Forelands is “good news” because “the copper wanted to green the world is now competing with national security demand,” Friedland said of governments pledging more money for their defense budgets. The exploration campaign is continuing and Ivanhoe plans to begin a scoping study early next year.

Ivanhoe’s other Congolese asset – the Kamoa-Kakula complex, a joint venture with China’s Zijin Mining Group – has been a rare bright spot for the copper production outlook. That’s despite a serious setback last year after seismic activity triggered flooding in an underground mine, which forced the owners to push back output targets.

A wave of investment, mainly from China, has transformed Congo into the world’s second-largest source of copper. The African nation’s deposits, including Western Forelands, typically contain much higher-grade ore than other major producers such as the No. 1 supplier Chile.

While Western Forelands has the same geology as Kamoa-Kakula, it’s more suited to open pit rather than underground mining, according to Friedland.

“There’s no reason why this isn’t a three- or four-year project” to bring into production, he said.