Ten new high-grade vein discoveries at the historic Galena Complex in Idaho's Silver Valley are fueling the most ambitious exploration campaign in Americas Gold and Silver's history.
Deep in the mountains of Shoshone County, Idaho, a mine that has been pulling silver out of the earth for more than a century is proving it still has plenty of secrets left. On March 12, 2026, Americas Gold and Silver Corporation announced the discovery of ten entirely new high-grade veins at its flagship Galena Complex - seven carrying silver-copper-antimony mineralization and three bearing silver-lead. The grades came back extraordinary. The headline intercept returned 4,896 grams per tonne silver and 3.95% copper over 1.3 meters, with a second hit at 2,563 g/t silver and 1.35% antimony over 0.7 meters. For a mine that first opened its doors in 1904, the finds felt like finding a hidden room in a house you've lived in for decades.
The ten new veins were drilled as part of near-mine exploration conducted in late 2025 - a deliberate effort to test ground adjacent to active mine workings rather than venture out to remote frontiers. Every one of the new intercepts returned silver grades materially above what currently sits inside the Galena Complex's official Mineral Resource and Mineral Reserve statement. That distinction matters: these are not low-grade curiosities on the fringes of the deposit. They are high-grade extensions threading through rock that already hosts over 100 million ounces of silver across proven, probable, measured, indicated, and inferred categories.
The Galena Complex is not a simple ore body. It hosts two fundamentally different types of mineralization underground. Galena ore - the silver-lead variety that gave the mine its name - has historically dominated production and has yielded more than 240 million ounces of silver and 1.7 billion pounds of lead over the mine's lifetime. Tetrahedrite ore, the silver-copper-antimony type, hosts higher silver grades and carries the critical mineral kicker: antimony, a silvery brittle metal with defense, electronics, and energy storage applications that the United States currently imports more than 90% of - primarily from China, Russia, and Tajikistan. Seven of the ten newly discovered veins are tetrahedrite-type, meaning they carry silver, copper, and antimony in a single intercept.
Paul Andre Huet, Chairman and CEO of Americas Gold and Silver, put it plainly: the results demonstrate the mine's capacity to keep delivering world-class silver intercepts more than 120 years after opening. What makes the discoveries operationally significant, beyond the grades alone, is their location. Because they sit near existing mine infrastructure - close to current workings and shafts rather than deep in unexplored ground - they can potentially be developed without the long lead times and capital requirements that remote discoveries typically demand.
The ten new vein discoveries did not emerge from a routine drill program. They emerged from a late-2025 near-mine exploration push that the company has now used as the blueprint for what it is calling the largest exploration campaign in its history. For 2026, Americas has approved approximately 64,000 meters of drilling companywide - split between the Galena Complex (including the recently acquired Crescent Mine) and the Cosala operations in Sinaloa, Mexico.
The 64,000-meter commitment represents a significant step change from prior programs. Underground and surface drill rigs are being mobilized to Crescent, a past-producing mine approximately nine miles from Galena that Americas acquired in December 2025. Crescent produced more than 25 million ounces of silver between 1917 and 1981 at an average grade of 891 g/t - ranking it among the world's highest-grade historic silver operations - and has not seen a systematic drill program in decades. The company holds a historical resource estimate of 3.8 million ounces in the Measured and Indicated category and 19.1 million ounces Inferred, though these figures predate current management and have not been updated under NI 43-101 standards.
The March 2026 discovery also builds on a 034 Vein Complex that Americas began expanding through late-2025 drilling. Earlier in 2026, the company announced eight new high-grade silver-copper-antimony splay veins associated with the 034 Vein - an exploration target estimated at 550,000 to 650,000 tonnes grading 290 to 310 g/t silver. The ten newly announced veins are distinct from the 034 complex, meaning Galena is now tracking multiple separate discovery threads simultaneously.
The timing of these exploration results sits at the intersection of two long-running trends that have accelerated sharply in recent years: the bull market in silver, driven by industrial demand from solar panels, electric vehicles, and 5G infrastructure; and the Western world's awakening to the supply-chain vulnerability created by its dependence on Chinese antimony.
Galena has been extracting antimony as a byproduct of its tetrahedrite ore for more than 80 years. Until recently, that antimony was largely written off as a processing nuisance - concentrated in flotation circuits but difficult to recover at market grade. That changed in September 2025, when Americas announced a greater than 99% antimony extraction breakthrough from its copper concentrate grading approximately 19% antimony. The result was a re-negotiated offtake agreement that made antimony payable as a byproduct starting January 2026 - turning a penalty metal into a revenue stream overnight. Global antimony prices had surged from roughly US$10,000 per tonne in 2020 to approximately US$50,000 per tonne by Q3 2025, driven by domestic demand.
To capture the downstream value, Americas moved quickly. On February 10, 2026, the company signed a definitive joint venture agreement with United States Antimony Corporation to build and operate an antimony processing facility directly on lands at the Galena Complex. Under the 51/49 partnership - Americas holding the majority - the JV will process Galena's antimony feed on market terms, with Americas' material receiving priority. CEO Paul Huet has publicly estimated the antimony processing JV could generate $50 to $70 million in incremental value for Americas shareholders.
None of this would be possible without a chain of transactions that consolidated and recapitalized Galena over the past 18 months. In December 2024, Americas acquired the remaining 40% stake it did not already own from an affiliate of billionaire resource investor Eric Sprott, making the Galena Complex 100% Americas property. In exchange, Sprott became the company's largest shareholder at approximately 14 to 20%. That transaction eliminated the divided ownership structure that had previously constrained major capital decisions at the mine.
Americas then executed what it calls a Recapitalization Plan - upgrading the No. 3 shaft hoist system in two phases that doubled skipping capacity from 40 to 80 tons per hour, commissioning more than 10 new underground vehicles, and reintroducing long-hole stoping methods that deliver roughly 60% lower cost per tonne compared to the underhand cut-and-fill methods previously used. In December 2025, a US$132 million bought deal financing was completed on an oversubscribed basis, giving the company the capital to fund both Crescent's restart and the record 2026 drilling campaign simultaneously.
By the time the ten new vein discoveries were announced in March 2026, Americas had completed a near-total operational and financial transformation of Galena - rebuilding the mine's shaft systems, modernizing its fleet, reopening a neighboring property, forming a critical minerals joint venture, and now tripling down on exploration. The 2025 full-year silver production result of 2.65 million ounces was itself described as a record under new management.
The immediate question for the 2026 program is how quickly the new veins can be converted from drill intercepts into defined resources. The company's geologists have already mapped parallel and splay vein intercepts adjacent to active mine workings, and these near-mine targets are expected to see the most aggressive follow-up drilling first. A Mineral Resource Estimate update for the Galena Complex is planned, which would incorporate both the 034 Vein Complex discoveries and the ten newly announced veins for the first time.
For the Crescent Mine, the 64,000-meter program will include some of the first systematic drilling the property has seen since before 1981. The company is targeting a mid-2026 production restart at Crescent, leveraging shared infrastructure and mill capacity with Galena to add between 1.4 and 1.6 million ounces of annual silver production to the district output.
Galena's Silver Valley neighbors - the Bunker Hill, Sunshine, and Lucky Friday mines - are testament to the district's capacity to produce at scale across multiple generations of ownership and technology. Americas is betting that the same geology that sustained those operations for more than a century has more to give. The ten new veins discovered in late 2025 suggest that, at minimum, its geologists have barely begun to test that hypothesis.