TL;DR
BT stands to make more than £2bn over the next decade selling the copper cabling Openreach is pulling out as it lays full fibre. Copper closed at a record £11,300 ($14,294) a tonne on Friday, driven partly by data centre construction. BT has just banked a second upfront payment of £99m.
An accidental beneficiary
This is one of the more unusual ways an AI build-out reaches a British balance sheet. Copper is central to the electrification of almost everything — data centres, renewables, electronics — and demand has run ahead of supply. S&P Global expects annual consumption to double by 2035, up from today’s 25m tonnes.
Since BT started stripping and selling cabling in 2023, the running total has reached 22,347 tonnes. The most recent year brought in close to 10,000 tonnes, nearly triple the figure two years earlier and 63% above the 5,600 tonnes booked in 2025. When the programme started, copper averaged around £6,700 ($8,500) a tonne, some 40% below today’s level.
The arrangement with recycler EMR runs on forward sales, each covering roughly 20,000 tonnes over four years, on top of anything BT chooses to sell at spot. Openreach reckons up to 200,000 tonnes are recoverable as the fibre rollout to 30m premises runs through the 2030s. The stock was previously valued near £1.5bn; at current prices the estimate is £2bn-plus.
The cost side
High prices bring thieves. Openreach has coated cabling with a synthetic DNA marker that transfers to skin and clothing, and credits it with a 30% fall in cable theft in 2024 — but it cannot be applied to cable already buried, which is where the losses continue. Attacks have hit the New Forest, County Tyrone and, twice in a month, St Neots in Cambridgeshire.
Looking forward
For UK businesses reading our coverage of data centre demand disputes and grid connection queues, this is the same story viewed from the other end. The AI build-out is repricing physical inputs across the economy, and the gains land in places nobody planned for — a telecoms incumbent monetising the network it is retiring. BT’s contract with EMR initially runs to 2028, so the windfall’s size depends on where copper sits when it is renegotiated.