Copper shipments into the United States are expected to accelerate in the coming weeks in a final scramble to get metal across the border before U.S. President Donald Trump's higher than expected 50% tariff on imported copper takes effect.

“The U.S. has been sucking in lots of copper that it didn’t really need from around the world,” Albert Mackenzie is a copper analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. President Trump had signaled that the tariffs were coming months ago, prompting many U.S. buyers to stockpile copper ahead of time.

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday his administration would soon be imposing a new 50% tariff on copper, though he left the exact details unclear. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CNBC that the tariffs would likely take effect later this month or early August.

U.S. President Donald Trump's 50% tariff on copper has placed a record premium on prices of the metal in the United States that is likely to ease over the coming months as a stockpile created by traders anticipating the levy works through the system.

U.S. President Donald Trump has launched a global trade war with an array of tariffs that target individual products and countries. Trump has set a baseline tariff of 10% on all imports to the United States,

The United States produces domestically just over half the refined copper it consumes each year. More than two-thirds of that is mined in Arizona, where the development of a massive new mine has been stalled for more than a decade. The remaining refined copper, just shy of 1 million metric tons annually, is imported.

"The big money will start coming in on Aug. 1, I think that was made clear today," Trump told reporters. He then turned to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who estimated that the United States could collect more than $300 billion in tariff revenue by the end of the year,