Silver rose more than 130% in 2025. It hit an all-time high of $121.78 an ounce on Jan. 29, 2026. Solar panels needed it. Electric vehicles needed it. AI data centers needed it.
For a metal that spent decades in gold’s shadow, 2025 looked like the year silver finally stepped out.
Then Kevin Warsh got nominated as the next Federal Reserve chair on Jan. 30. Silver crashed more than 27% in three weeks. It has been grinding to find a floor ever since, and JPMorgan just handed investors a number that tells them where the bank thinks that floor is.
JPMorgan cuts silver price forecast to $60-$65 an ounce
Gregory Shearer, head of Base and Precious Metals Strategy at JPMorgan, now sees silver averaging $60 to $65 an ounce through the rest of the year, according to Reuters. That is a significant cut from the bank’s earlier call of $81 an ounce for the full year, with a Q4 high of $85. Silver futures briefly hit $57 before recovering to around $62.
The revised number reflects two things happening at once. Investor demand dried up after the January rate shock. Industrial demand, which accounts for roughly 60% of total annual silver consumption, is also softening in the sectors that carried the 2025 rally. Both legs weakened at the same time.
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“On silver, we’re much more apprehensive, just because we don’t necessarily trust that you have potentially shaken the full amount of froth out of this price,” Shearer said on JPMorgan’s research podcast.
“Essentially, you could have a down day in gold, say, one or 2%, and that translates into almost 10 to 15% of a drop in silver,” he added.
Why silver’s biggest industrial customer is walking away
The solar industry was supposed to keep silver elevated for years. It is now the story of why the rally stalled.
Silver’s share of solar panel pricing was under 5% historically. As prices cleared $80 and $90 an ounce, that number climbed above 30%. At that level, manufacturers started doing the math differently.
Longi Green Energy, one of China’s largest solar producers, revealed plans to replace silver with copper in its back-contact cells. Jinko Solar made a similar call. Shanghai Aiko Solar has already launched silver-free cells.
Related: Silver price drops after Trump makes stunning claim about Iran
BloombergNEF estimates silver demand from solar installations will fall to roughly 194 million ounces in 2026, a 7% year-on-year drop, even as global solar capacity keeps growing by around 15%.
As TheStreet reported, the Silver Institute expects global silver industrial fabrication to decline about 2% in 2026 to a four-year low.
“Long term, the largest risk we see for silver comes from more widespread adoption of silver-free technology, such as the cadmium telluride thin-film technology,” Shearer said.
“We’ve already seen some of the larger solar panel manufacturers in China announce thrifting plans to move into copper and other base metals, or even to advance silverless solar panels as we look forward. So we do think that this price rally has already set in motion an acceleration in substitution trends,” he added.
The structural problem silver has that gold does not
When gold dips, central banks buy it. China’s People’s Bank alone ramped reported purchases from about one tonne a month to eight tonnes by April 2026. Sovereign buyers treat gold as a reserve asset and buy on weakness. Silver does not have that backstop.
Central banks do not hold silver reserves. No government treasury steps in as a consistent buyer when prices drop. When investor sentiment shifts and industrial users pull back simultaneously, silver has no institutional floor underneath it.
Shearer made this explicit. “I don’t think it’s likely that central banks will move on from gold into other precious metals like silver,” he said. “Which means that you don’t have something like in gold where these central banks have been the biggest and most consistent dip buyers on this entire rally. Silver, that’s not there.”
That is why silver dropped over 27% when gold fell 10% after the Warsh nomination. Same catalyst, very different landing.
As TheStreet reported in June, silver fell to a two-month low of $63.37 on June 9 as Iran war-related inflation fears pushed Fed rate-hike bets higher, while gold’s decline was considerably shallower.
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What other major banks are saying about silver prices in 2026
JPMorgan is not alone in pulling back on silver. ING commodity analyst Ewa Manthey lowered the bank’s forecast in June, citing slowing solar demand, higher yields, a stronger dollar, and weaker investor flows. ING now sees silver at $68 an ounce in the third quarter and $74 in the fourth, down from a previous Q4 estimate of $84.
Goldman Sachs is more upbeat on the broader metals complex. The bank is forecasting gold at $4,900 by year’s end, according to Yahoo Finance, anchored on central bank buying and sovereign demand. That thesis supports gold more directly than silver.
JPMorgan’s own Marko Kolanovic has warned silver could fall back to $50 if speculative positioning unwinds before fundamentals can catch up.
What silver investors should watch for the rest of 2026
The long-term case for silver remains grounded in real demand. Electric vehicles use 25 to 50 grams of silver each, roughly three times what a combustion engine car requires. AI data centers consume it in volume.
The global silver market has been in deficit for six consecutive years, and mine supply, 70% of which comes as a byproduct of mining other metals, cannot respond quickly to price signals.
What matters now is whether the near-term demand weakness is temporary or the start of a structural shift. If Chinese solar manufacturers successfully scale copper-based and silver-free panels at volume, the demand math changes permanently for one of silver’s biggest end markets.
JPMorgan still expects some recovery later in the year. The bank’s long-term thesis on precious metals has not changed. But between the Warsh rate shock, the solar substitution trend, and the absence of central bank support, silver’s path back to $81 or higher needs new buyers to show up and old ones to return.
Neither has happened yet.
Related: UBS resets silver price target for rest of 2026
