For such a quotidian element, tin has played an outsized role in the march of history: tools in the Bronze Age, canning food to fuel Napoleon’s armies and, now, as a “compute metal” integral to AI servers.
That last of these explains why average tin prices have doubled since 2003, to about $49,000 a tonne. It is the least traded base metal on the London Metal Exchange, with average daily volumes just a few per cent those of copper, but speculators began joining in at the end of last year — to such an extent that in Shanghai the national industry body stepped in to warn them off.
AI is famously hungry for compute power and energy. But it also depends on soldering bits of metal together, and it is tin that does the soldering. Racks, power modules and networking switches: all component parts require glueing.