National telecoms provider could make $2.7 billion selling recycled copper in AI boom — BT to strip 200,000 tons from legacy network

BT, the UK’s largest telecommunications provider, is slowly upgrading its entire network to fiber, with the company looking to move residential endpoints away from copper, and it seems that it will make a killing when it recycles its old cables. According to The Guardian, the company has signed a deal with EMR, one of the largest cable recycling companies in the country, for the recovery of around 200,000 tons of copper over a span of four years. Although the total value of the deal is unclear, the latter has also already paid more than USD 134 million (GBP 99 million) to the telecoms company for a few thousand tons of copper. Aside from the deal with EMR, BT and its subsidiary, Openreach, could also sell the recovered copper directly on the spot market.

More than 22,000 metric tons have already been recovered from the system since BT started its network upgrade, with the metal costing around USD 8,500 per metric ton on the market. If the company sold all that material in the open market, it would have made revenue of USD 187 million. However, the massive AI-driven demand for copper has pushed prices to a record high of more than USD 14,000 per metric ton. The upgrade work is expected to continue well into the 2030s, with Openreach estimating that it could still recover up to 200,000 metric tons of material. That means the company could make an estimated USD 2.7 to 2.8 billion just from the sale of these old network cables.