Gold had a stupendous 2025, the price of an ounce reaching $3,000 for the first time in March, and then topping $4,000 in October. It closed 2025 at more than $4,300 an ounce, 66 percent higher than the price at the start of the year.

To which silver could have said “hold my beer.”

Silver started the year at around $30 an ounce. It ended on Dec. 31 at a little over $70 — a 144 percent increase.

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Nevada is the nation’s largest gold producer, and the second largest producer of silver, after Alaska.

Silver doesn’t get near the attention gold does, not even in the Silver State. In debates over Nevada mining taxes over the years, the focus has been on the value of gold, with silver warranting a mention, if at all, as an also-ran.

That’s for good reason.

When the Nevada Department of Taxation reports mining tax revenues for the Silver State’s primary mining tax, silver isn’t even reported separately. Instead, the value of silver, a byproduct of mining gold, copper, and other minerals, is unceremoniously lumped into total “Gold/Silver” production revenues.

According to Taxation’s 2024 report, $9.08 billion of “Gold/Silver” was mined in Nevada in 2024.

Roughly 5.7 million ounces of silver were mined in Nevada in 2024, according to the Nevada Division of Minerals. At the annual average price that year of a little less than $30 an ounce, that would amount to around $162 million worth of silver.

Which would mean the value of gold mined in Nevada in 2024 was more than $8.9 billion, 55 times as much as the value of silver.

‘Next generation metal’ though

The skyrocketing price of precious metals over the last year has been attributed in large part to investors worldwide seeking shelter amid global economic volatility and uncertainty, coupled with the declining value of the world’s dominant currency, the U.S. dollar, which dropped by 10 percent in 2025.

Especially late in the year, some analysts were also describing the rising price of gold and silver as a “momentum trade,” a corollary of FOMO (fear of missing out), in which investors chase after whatever stock or commodity is going up in a flashy way.

But a number of other — and more silver-specific — factors also contributed to the price of silver outpacing gold (as well as the stock prices for Nvidia and the techs) in 2025. In addition to being a precious metal that investors might turn to in volatile times, silver, unlike gold, has, as the cryptocurrency investors might say, multiple “use cases.”

Like gold, silver is shiny. But silver also has the highest electrical conductivity of any metal.

“Silver is poised to play a pivotal ‘next generation metal’ role across industries critical to the green energy transition and digital transformation over the coming decade,” reads a December report on the mineral’s key industrial applications commissioned by the Silver Institute, a global industry association.

Silver “enhances energy conversion in solar panels; accelerates data processing in data centers; and enables rapid charging and efficient power transmission in electric vehicles,” the report says.

While the Trump administration may not share the Silver Institute’s enthusiasm for solar power and EV’s, it’s all-in on data centers and the AI hyperscaling for which they stand, and has acknowledged silver has a value beyond merely looking pretty.

The U.S. Geological Survey in November added silver, along with copper, to the official list of “critical minerals,” potentially meaning tariff and federal investment and regulatory policies that would be favorable to U.S. silver producers.

Silver’s status as more than just another shiny object was also underscored in October when China, the world’s second-leading source of silver behind Mexico (the U.S. ranks 9th), announced new restrictions on silver exports, set to take effect with the new year. “This is not good,” Elon Musk wrote on his social media site earlier this week. “Silver is needed in many industrial processes.”

“Good” depends on one’s perspective. Higher metal prices benefit companies with silver-yielding mines.

Musk’s concern notwithstanding, many analysts project the price of silver will continue to rise in 2026, for a lot of the same reasons that drove precious metal prices to shoot up in 2025.

And as the Nevada Mining Association puts it in a blurb on its website, “When performance is more important than price, silver is often the material of choice.”

Continued rising prices of silver and other precious metals is by no means a sure thing. Of all commodity prices, minerals are infamously among the most volatile.

Meanwhile, even if silver has entered a new normal, and the price continues to soar upward, easily and by far the most valuable mineral in the Silver State will still be gold.