LONDON, Oct 13 (Reuters) - Traditional applications for

copper will continue to account for the vast majority of demand

for the metal over the next decade, rather than data centres and

the defence industry, the CEO of trading house Trafigura said on

Monday.

Speaking at the LME Week seminar in London, Richard Holtum

noted that defence spending and artificial intelligence (AI)

were "buzzwords" in the conversation around metals demand at the

moment. However, AI demand for copper will be "dwarfed three

times" by demand from consumer goods this year, he said.

"The amount of copper that goes into just air conditioning

... is more than the amount of copper that's going to go into

data centres this year," Holtum said in a dialogue with the CEO

of the London Metal Exchange, Matt Chamberlain.

"Whilst everyone wants to talk about data centres and

defence and it's all great, actually 90% of the demand for

copper we see in the next 10 years comes from the traditional

infrastructure, construction, urbanisation, consumer goods

sources," Holtum said.

Consultancy CRU expects copper demand from data centres to

reach 260,000 tons this year, up from 78,000 tons in 2020 and

exceeding 650,000 tons by 2030.

Holtum said that while the new applications would add

significant demand, "the amount of air time that defence and AI

gets relative to where the actual demand is is slightly

disproportionate."