Ambition to action

The pressure is on the global mining industry. The world is navigating an era of energy security challenges, geopolitical fragmentation, the impacts of a technology-fuelled fourth industrial revolution, and rising societal expectations. To meet the growing demand for metals and minerals, the industry needs to deliver more of them—and do so more efficiently. As we look to the future of mining, there’s a clear need to diversify production and processing. And that means working more effectively in an ecosystem that’s credible, investable, and resilient.

Meeting these challenges and capturing value from evolving global supply chains is a central imperative. To succeed, the many players and participants in the mining ecosystem—which includes mining and processing firms, policymakers, investors, end users, and companies in adjacent industries—need to collaborate as they move from ambition to action across three broad areas.

First, governments need to set policy in motion, developing the incentives and regulatory frameworks that support stable investment and mining profitability. Second, while geology determines who can participate in mining, the ability to make projects investable and the positioning of capital providers ultimately dictate who captures the most value. As a result, the ecosystem must set capital in motion to make projects operational and create greater upstream and midstream production capacity.

Third, operating companies must adopt technological solutions, notably AI, to enhance productivity at the mine face, while also improving efficiency and performance at a broader strategic level. The challenges throw into stark relief the need for greater collaboration across sector and industry boundaries.  

These pressures come as the industry reports what was in many respects a solid year for the top 40 mining companies (by market capitalisation) that we analyse. Total revenues grew 3.3% to US$909 billion from US$880 billion in 2024, while earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation surged 23% to US$248 billion and net profit rose to US$120 billion. The improvement reflects two key factors: first, sharply higher prices for precious metals (including gold and silver), platinum group metals, and energy metals such as copper; and second, improved operational leverage and disciplined cost management.  

As we can see below, the headline improvements mask significant divergences and nuances in the results. 

The critical minerals race is too often framed as a contest decided by a single factor: geology. Countries lucky enough to possess these minerals are assumed to hold a structural advantage over those without them. But in fact, success in critical minerals also depends on factors that countries can control. As we highlighted in our Mine 2025 report, production advantages go to nations that complement their geological endowment with processing capability. China, for example, accounts for more than 50% of production for 18 minerals and holds significant shares of reserves across many more. Yet China also dominates the processing and refining of minerals that are extracted mainly in other parts of the world.  

Geology, in other words, is no longer sufficient. Countries with exceptional resource positions can leave value stranded if projects don’t get timely permits, adequate capital, or efficient processing technology. Those with more modest endowments can still secure strategic relevance if policy, capital, and technological capability make projects investable and midstream capacity viable.  

This means the next phase of competition will be decided less by who can articulate ambitions most clearly than by who can create a credible route from policy to capital and capability.  

Meaningful change will take many years to shift the current concentration of activity. The development of mines and midstream processing infrastructure spans years and even decades. And the grip of incumbents remains strong. The chart below analyses the approaches of nine different countries across five key dimensions: strategic clarity, delivery architecture, funding and de-risking, evidence of execution, and sovereign capability. What links these approaches isn’t a common ideology but a set of shared insights. Critical minerals success depends on reducing risk across the project life cycle and value chain. Resource extraction may establish relevance, but midstream capability is what turns it into lasting economic benefit. This is why there’s a need for policy changes to translate the potential to develop minerals into mining and processing projects that reach the operational stage.

The map below describes the ways in which the eight key countries (excluding China) are approaching the challenges of turning policy into action. 

A road map for change

Taken together, these proposals offer a road map to a more effective global system. As these examples show, policymakers recognise that expansion of mining and processing activity takes not only strategic clarity about a country’s potential role in the value chain but also ample investment. The considerable funds that governments themselves have promised to invest are just a start. Far more capital will be needed to realise the most promising opportunities. 

Mining captures only a small part of the annual US$3.3 trillion of global investment in energy and related industries. Mining development capital—the investment that creates new supply—stood at approximately US$55 billion in 2024. That’s less than one-eighth of the amount invested in solar photovoltaics and less than one-tenth of what was spent on data centre construction—two industries heavily dependent on mining. Forecasts by PwC and Oxford Economics indicate that these investment gaps will persist. They show that while annual investment in metals and mining infrastructure will rise by 39% from 2024 to 2050 to reach US$128 billion, outlays on renewables will climb 52%.

The gap, we’d argue, is structural, not cyclical. Mining projects, as a class, present common failure points. When considering new projects, investors test for these potential weaknesses by evaluating three investability conditions: 

Investors must also assess the challenges and opportunities associated with the value chains and end markets for individual minerals. Converting abundant copper reserves into producing mines at returns acceptable to institutional capital has become structurally more difficult with every project generation. Gold, meanwhile, trades on deep, liquid markets; central bank demand provides a structural floor; debt markets function well; and institutional equity is abundant. Yet big miners deploying record cash flows consistently choose M&A over greenfield exploration. The industry reported no major gold discoveries in both 2023 and 2024, down from more than 20 per year through the 1990s.

Then there are magnet rare-earth elements—such as neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium—that serve as critical inputs for electric vehicle motors, defence systems, and wind turbines. Since deposits of these minerals are concentrated in China, governments and companies elsewhere must either manage difficult relationships with Chinese counterparties or invest substantially in exploration in untested geographies.

There’s an additional challenge: the absence of a single mining capital market. As the chart below shows, each mineral operates under a distinct capital logic, investability constraint, and value chain dynamic.

Mapping the risk curve

Mining capital operates through two distinct ecosystems. In the first, large miners fund development from their own balance sheets. In the second, independent developers must attract external capital from investors with explicit mandate constraints. The structural funding gap is a feature of the second ecosystem only. This makes it often necessary for independent developers to piece together funding from various sources from stage to stage. Understanding how access to capital can shift over the course of a development is vital to getting new projects through to production.

The chart below shows where each financing instrument operates across the development life cycle, illustrating where those conditions are met and where they fall short.

It shows a pronounced funding gap during the exploration and discovery/feasibility stages. This is precisely where the investment decisions that determine future supply are made and where only Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) and blended finance structures offer coverage. The valley of death lies between initial discovery and the final investment decision, when a project requires the most capital to prove its geology, complete feasibility studies, and secure permits, but where the absence of contractable cash flows means institutional capital won’t yet commit.  

Financial coverage is broadest at the production and operating stage, where assets generate cash, debt can be serviced, and institutional mandates best align with miners’ deployment needs. In the midstream/processing stage, gaps persist regardless of the financing instrument, reflecting a market infrastructure problem due to the absence of price benchmarks, financing templates, and transaction history that institutional mandates require. In the development and construction stage, project finance debt and joint venture capital operate selectively, while venture capital and private equity have largely withdrawn.

Structures that move capital

The challenge of securing conventional equity and debt is particularly acute until miners can convince investors that a project will generate positive cash flows. Now, however, developers are using novel structures to create the contractual certainty that private markets can’t generate alone. These include:

The challenge now is to bring scale to such efforts, and the work falls on both sides. For miners, the critical shift is sequencing: they must resolve investment conditions before seeking capital, not after. Miners that cross the investment threshold build contract certainty into their proposition before they enter an investor meeting. For governments, the most powerful lever is in creating investment certainty, rather than providing direct capital, through price floors, strategic offtake guarantees, and permitted project pipelines that convert uncertain commodity cash flows into contracted streams. Governments that de-risk rather than replace private capital can multiply the impact of private investment and get more resources deployed faster and at a lower cost to the public. 

Output per worker in the mining industry has fallen since 2020, and the constraints are tightening. Scarce capital, declining ore grades, high energy costs, and talent shortfalls all make it difficult for miners to improve returns on investment. The workforce is ageing, and 39% of mining employers expect an inability to attract talent will hinder their transformations. Finally, mining companies are often behind the curve on technology adoption. 

In response, companies are placing a higher premium on productivity as a strategy. Historically, mining companies have pursued productivity gains in the traditional realm of front-line, on-the-ground improvements to exploration, extraction, processing, logistics, and other operational processes. Now, however, leaders are looking at productivity from a wider perspective. For these companies, productivity is also the lens for making decisions about assets, investments, people, and organisation. Companies are focusing on productivity levers within their organisations: structuring the operating model for performance, streamlining ways of working, and investing in the workforce to get the most out of people. At the highest strategic level, they’re striving to gain more productivity out of their assets and investments through effective portfolio optimisation, capital allocation, and asset management. Key areas of focus for mining companies include:

Bridging mining’s technology gap

The mining sector has long pursued innovation initiatives aimed at boosting productivity. Yet it has also struggled to turn experimentation into industrial-scale solutions that deliver meaningful productivity gains. Current advances in technology, data, and AI present both a challenge and an opportunity.

PwC’s recent AI performance study, which looked at the AI practices and AI-driven financial performance of more than 1,200 companies worldwide, found that mining had the lowest score of any sector on our AI fitness index. This is explained by factors such as a lack of investment in innovation and the inadequacy of data and governance frameworks. These gaps come with real costs: the most AI-fit companies, the study showed, enjoy an AI-driven performance boost that’s 7.2 times higher—through a combination of increased revenues and cost reductions—than their peers. Indeed, in PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey, 40% of mining CEOs said their company’s technology performance was below expectations. 

What will it take to turn things around? The AI performance study points to three critical practices for mining companies to consider:

By following these practices, AI can help mining executives better construct a strategic approach to productivity growth and prioritise innovation investment. This will give leaders visibility into performance, risk, and capital effectiveness across organisational layers and assets. What’s more, AI deployment can improve a mining company’s asset liquidity. Assets with transparent, high-quality data; standardised processes; and demonstrable productivity performance are easier to integrate, value, and transact. In a consolidating sector, this matters. 

Mining can also turn to its peers in the oil and gas sector for learnings and frameworks for technology-driven productivity growth. ConocoPhillips recently embarked on a multiyear SAP S/4HANA transformation, and rather than positioning the programme as a technology upgrade, leadership framed it explicitly around productivity, reliability, and decision speed. The results were material: improved asset-performance management, a shift to predictive from reactive maintenance, and faster integration of acquisitions. The programme delivered approximately US$1 billion in efficiencies while strengthening resilience during periods of market disruption.

The convergence of capital scarcity, declining asset quality, cost inflation, and technological change sets the bounds in which mining operates. Changing government policies and emerging financial structures are shaping the environment in which companies invest, plan, and work. The big challenge for the future of mining is for companies to convert their ambitions into action despite the challenges they face from these converging forces of change. That means thinking more broadly about productivity growth and access to capital and focusing on digital technologies and AI as critical enablers. As the mining industry looks to 2027 and beyond, success will be defined not just by companies’ access to capital or technology but by their discipline and effectiveness in deploying it.

This year’s writing team

The writing of Mine 2026 was led by Sacha Winzenried (PwC Indonesia), Andrew Jenkins (PwC Indonesia), and Matthew Williams (PwC United Kingdom). Core members of the writing team were Carlos Rivas (PwC Chile), Isakh Salomon (PwC Indonesia), Lochlan Farrell (PwC Australia), Swapnil Gupta (PwC India), and Zubair Desai (PwC South Africa).