AI, tariffs revive US copper manufacturer tied to Paul Revere

Revere Copper Products Inc. is ramping up US investment as tariffs and surging demand from data centers lift earnings at America’s oldest copper manufacturer.

New orders have climbed 34% this year from the same period in 2025, supporting Revere’s plans to increase capital spending to $30 million, said Amy O’Shaughnessy, the company’s head of sales and marketing. That compares with investment budgets of $2 million or less just a few years ago.

O’Shaughnessy’s insights on the closely held maker of semi-finished products offer a rare window into a segment of the US copper supply chain that typically discloses little financial information. The company, which traces its roots to revolutionary war hero Paul Revere, and its peers turn refined copper into products such as wire rods, tubes, sheets and strips.

Revere plans to triple the size of its North Carolina plant and double output at its Rome, New York, facility to meet demand from artificial-intelligence data centers, O’Shaughnessy said. While the AI build-out has buoyed the company in recent years, she said the latest order acceleration stems from the 50% tariff the US government imposed in August on imports of semi-finished copper products.

“Tariffs allowed us to raise prices to where we needed them to be to reinvest,” she said. “It’s the best thing that’s happened to us in 30 years.”

O’Shaughnessy expects that pace of sales growth to continue at least through this year as customers finish drawing down inventories accumulated ahead of the tariff’s implementation. Imports are likely to decline more significantly by 2027 as additional US capacity comes online, she said.

Revere, and O’Shaughnessy in particular, was a part of a successful lobbying effort to keep refined copper imports free of tariffs last year, given the US doesn’t produce enough of the metal to meet all the needs of manufacturers. Now the Rome, New York-based manufacturer is pushing for tariffs to be applied to some of those end products made by its customers, she said.

Additional safeguards against low-cost imports are needed to bolster domestic manufacturing as the data-center boom gathers pace, O’Shaughnessy said. The volume projections from her equipment-making customers represents “the biggest forecast I’ve ever seen in my 27 years.”

(By James Attwood and Yvonne Yue Li)