Three years ago, after the pandemic had laid bare the world’s vulnerability to supply-chain disruptions, the U.S. government designated a large swath of the periodic table of elements — 50 minerals in all — as “critical.”
The United States obtains more than half of them, including a category of 17 minerals known as “rare earths,” mostly from China. And this week, China tightened its export restrictions on six rare earths, all but halting U.S. access to new supplies.
Here’s a look at just how dependent the United States is on China for a broad range of these critical minerals, including rare earths.
China not only mines most of the world’s rare earths, it is home to most of the world’s capacity for refining them. Refining refers to the process of taking the raw minerals and turning them into compounds that have broad industrial applications, whether in batteries or semiconductors or fiber optics, or even the magnets that enable power steering in most vehicles.
Many rare earths have chemical properties that make them heat resistant, so they can be used to create high-quality magnets, glass, lights and batteries. Magnets made from rare earths are significantly more powerful and valuable than other types, particularly in electric-car production.
China produces 90 percent of rare earth magnets. The new export restrictions apply to them, too.
In other words, a great deal of modern technology that we rely on for communications, energy production and even warfare depends on China’s extraction and processing of these minerals.
According to the Defense Department, every F-35 fighter contains around 900 pounds of rare earth materials. Some submarines need more than 9,200 pounds of the materials. Demand for critical minerals is expected to skyrocket in the coming years, driven by growth in electric vehicles as well as expansion of data centers for artificial intelligence.
For more than a decade, China has used its control over mineral supplies to exert geopolitical pressure. In 2010, China restricted exports of rare earth minerals to Japan during tensions over a maritime border dispute. That ban lasted seven weeks.
Before this month, China had already restricted U.S. access to four critical minerals — gallium, germanium, antimony and graphite — in retaliation for earlier rounds of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. Those minerals are used in chip-making and have applications in semiconductors, military explosives and other weaponry.
In recent years, Chinese state-owned companies have taken over all foreign-owned rare earth refineries in the country. Beijing has also labeled its techniques around rare earth mining and refining as state secrets, further consolidating control over production and export.
Unlike in the United States, dozens of universities in China offer programs structured around rare earth mining and refining. China has developed technologies that allow Chinese companies to extract rare earths at a significantly lower cost than anywhere else in the world.
“The developments we have seen take place in 2025 add further impetus to the desire of the U.S. to diversify its supply chains away from China, but this cannot be done overnight,” Andrew Foran, an economist with TD Bank who analyzes the mineral trade between the United States and China, said in an email.
Some critical minerals, like nickel and lithium, are far more abundant than rare earths, and American mining companies have been engaged for years in extracting them domestically and across the world, though at a fraction of the scale of Chinese companies.
Rare earths, on the other hand, have narrower supply chains and are often more difficult to extract, requiring more cumbersome processes to separate them from other minerals.
The United States has just one operational rare earth mine, in Mountain Pass, Calif., which produces around 15 percent of global rare earths. President Trump issued an executive order last month seeking to support domestic mineral production by speeding up permitting and providing financing for new projects.
But the United States lacks domestic reserves of many critical minerals, so it will need new trading partners if it wishes to ease its reliance on China. Since taking office, Mr. Trump has sought to increase American access to certain critical minerals and rare earths through deals with Ukraine and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and there are deposits in Canada and Greenland, which Mr. Trump has mused about annexing.
Some American companies have been stockpiling rare earths for years in anticipation of a trade war. But the sizes of their emergency stockpiles vary widely, so the timing of production disruptions is hard to predict.
Max Bearak is a Times reporter who writes about global energy and climate policies and new approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Harry Stevens is a Times reporter and graphics editor covering climate change, energy and the natural world.
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