A $1.1 Billion Signal for Arizona’s Next Copper Mine

The Export-Import Bank of the United States just raised its bet on a new American copper mine. On August 24, 2026, Ivanhoe Electric announced that the agency issued a Preliminary Project Letter indicating it could lend up to $1.1 billion toward the company’s Santa Cruz copper project near Casa Grande, Arizona, a jump from the $825 million the bank had floated in an April 2025 Letter of Interest.

At a glance

• US EXIM’s Preliminary Project Letter (PPL) signals potential debt financing of $1.1 billion for Santa Cruz, up from $825 million in April 2025.
• The PPL is not a financing commitment. EXIM’s board is not expected to take up a final decision until spring 2027.
• Santa Cruz sits on roughly 6,000 acres of company-owned private land near Casa Grande, about 40 miles southeast of Phoenix.
• The mine plan calls for copper cathode that is 99.99 percent pure without a smelting step, averaging 72,000 tonnes a year over the first 15 years of a 23-year mine life.
• An updated preliminary feasibility study, folding in a new tunnel-boring-machine plan for underground access, is due in September 2026.

What did the Export-Import Bank actually approve?

Nothing final yet. A Preliminary Project Letter marks the close of EXIM’s preliminary due diligence, not a signed loan. It tells Ivanhoe Electric that the bank is comfortable enough with the project to keep moving toward a real financing facility, and it arrives through EXIM’s Make More in America Initiative, a program built to back domestic projects that expand US manufacturing capacity and strengthen critical supply chains. Company leadership still has to work through loan terms with EXIM before the bank’s board takes up a final commitment, a step the company expects in the spring of 2027.

Why is Washington backing one Arizona copper project this heavily?

Copper demand is climbing faster than new US supply, pulled along by data centers, grid buildouts, and electric vehicles, and Santa Cruz is one of the larger domestic projects positioned to help close that gap. Executive Chairman Robert Friedland tied the letter to President Trump’s remarks at the American Mining Roundtable in Washington on August 7, 2026, framing Santa Cruz as part of an effort to rebuild copper supply chains at home. The project’s design skips a traditional smelter altogether, producing copper cathode directly on site, which the company says cuts both cost and environmental footprint.

What is left before Santa Cruz starts producing?

Quite a bit. Ivanhoe Electric already holds permits covering reclamation, air quality, dust control, aquifer protection, and land use, but it still needs approvals for surface construction and production. The company also expects an updated preliminary feasibility study in September 2026 that incorporates a new underground access plan using a Robbins Crossover XRE tunnel-boring machine, built by the Robbins Company of Solon, Ohio. If financing and permitting line up, Santa Cruz would add a new node to Arizona’s copper map alongside Freeport-McMoRan’s Morenci complex, the mine the Mining Our Future tour’s Arizona stop is built around.