State of Steel: Post Global Steel Dynamics Forum Take
World Steel Dynamics is coming off a tremendous week at the Global Steel Dynamics Forum in New York City, two days that brought much of the U.S. flat-rolled industry’s leadership into one room. Fireside chats with Lourenco Goncalves of Cleveland-Cliffs, Steve Laxton of Nucor, Mark Millett of Steel Dynamics, and David Burritt of U.S. Steel anchored the program, alongside a WSD-hosted downstream panel featuring Eddie Lehner of Ryerson, Todd Leebow of Majestic Steel, and Janice Lee of Boston Consulting Group. We came away more comfortable than ever reaffirming our forecast: a market that is tight, climbing, and showing little inclination to turn before fall.
Two themes overarched most conversations throughout the conference. The first was artificial intelligence, which surfaced on two fronts. One was operational — how the technology is being implemented across the steel supply chain itself, from raw materials through to the downstream tasks of sales and marketing. The other, and arguably the more consequential for steel demand, was physical: the infrastructure required to build AI out. That means data centers rising across the country, and behind them the steel-intensive energy and electricity infrastructure needed to power them. The second theme was tariffs. With the market now at the one-year mark of 50% steel tariffs, and a USMCA renegotiation underway, trade policy remains the dominant variable shaping U.S. supply.
On the ground, the conversations only sharpened our conviction. HRC is quickly approaching $1,150 per ton, and participant after participant reaffirmed to WSD what the price action already implies: supply is incredibly tight. Lead times continue to stretch, spot availability is thin, and for the time being there is little new import volume arriving to relieve the squeeze.
Demand, however, is anything but uniform — it is sharply bifurcated. The strength is concentrated on the construction side, driven by the AI infrastructure buildout, the tail end of spending from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, and a swelling energy infrastructure program. Our downstream panel with Lehner, Leebow, and Lee confirmed the picture at both the service-center and the macro level: the data infrastructure buildout is supporting healthy demand and genuine growth. Crucially, this is not a near-term spike. As WSD has argued in prior forecasting work, the buildout has real legs. Project backlogs run years forward — companies like Google are already acquiring land for data centers that, in some cases, will not break ground for five to ten years. The energy side tells the same story from a different angle: lead times on transmission materials and equipment are so long that the system simply cannot build fast enough. Both point to durable steel demand for some time to come.
The contrast with the consumer economy is stark. Residential, automotive, and appliances all remain notably weak. Consumer confidence is low and the U.S. consumer cautious, leaving residential construction growth muted in the near term and offering little reason to expect a meaningful pickup in auto demand any time soon.
The contrast with the consumer economy is stark. Residential, automotive, and appliances all remain notably weak. Consumer confidence is low and the U.S. consumer cautious, leaving residential construction growth muted in the near term and offering little reason to expect a meaningful pickup in auto demand any time soon.
Against that backdrop, WSD reaffirms its call: pricing should continue its methodical $5 to $10 per ton march toward $1,200, and we see little that would snap that momentum through the balance of the summer. The one genuine pressure release is trade — though not the one many expected. As our USMCA panel with U.S., Canadian, and Mexican trade representatives made clear, a renegotiation is not coming in the immediate term. And the supply math has already tightened materially: imports from Canada and Mexico have fallen by roughly 3 million tons on an annualized basis versus 2024 levels, essentially the equivalent of pulling an entire sheet mill out of the market.
What is increasingly clear from our conversations, though, is that prices near $1,200 are doing what high prices eventually do — pulling buyers back toward foreign material. Even with tariffs and elevated freight rates making imports relatively expensive, the arbitrage is becoming too wide to ignore, and WSD sees this as the only meaningful near-term release valve for a rally now in its eighth straight month, one that has carried HRC from the high $700s to a likely $1,200 by July. Even so, we do not expect much softening before early fall. New domestic supply is limited, and demand is showing real stability, underpinned by a historic infrastructure buildout. For now, the path of least resistance is still up.