Washington is building a state-backed minerals strategy to counter Beijing’s grip on the materials of the future.
Washington has stopped debating who owns the periodic table. Now it is buying in.
In a concentrated burst of industrial policy stretching from a Nevada high desert to the halls of the Pentagon, the United States government has moved in less than 18 months from passive concern to direct equity holder in the companies producing the materials it most needs. The strategy - combining government loans, equity stakes, accelerated federal permitting, and a web of bilateral diplomatic agreements with more than 21 countries - is the most aggressive attempt in a generation to reduce American dependence on China's dominant position in critical minerals processing. The test case is lithium. The playbook, if it works, will extend to everything else.
When the International Energy Agency released its Global Critical Minerals Outlook in 2025, the finding that drew the most attention was both stark and specific: for 19 out of 20 strategic minerals, China is the leading refiner, with an average market share of 70 percent. The number is even more concentrated in certain sectors. China controls roughly 90 percent of global rare earth processing capacity, more than 80 percent of key battery supply chain components including cathode precursor materials, and the near-totality of certain strategic inputs such as lithium iron phosphate cathode materials.
What makes this arrangement particularly strategic is that China does not always need to control the mine. By owning the conversion capacity - the refineries, processing plants, and chemical facilities that transform raw ore into battery-grade material - Beijing can sit astride supply chains even when the original extraction happens in Australia, Chile, or Argentina. China processes roughly 75 percent of the world's lithium into battery-grade material even though Australia and Chile are the primary miners. A mine in Nevada can produce lithium clay. Without domestic processing infrastructure, that clay still travels to China before it becomes a battery.
Beijing has not been subtle about using this position as a geopolitical instrument. Beginning in late 2023 and escalating sharply through 2025, China rolled out a cascading series of export controls covering gallium, germanium, graphite, antimony, tungsten, and seven heavy rare earth elements including terbium and dysprosium - elements central to the permanent magnets found in F-35 fighter jets, submarine motors, and EV drivetrains. In April 2025, when China imposed controls on those seven rare earths, European rare earth prices reached as much as six times their Chinese equivalents, and American automakers were forced to cut production line utilization at facilities dependent on permanent magnets. Ford temporarily halted production at its Chicago SUV plant in May 2025 after rare earth magnet shortages hit electric power steering supply chains. The message from Beijing was clear enough that even its November 2025 partial suspension - timed to a Trump-Xi meeting in South Korea and framed as a goodwill gesture - was widely read as confirmation of the original point: China could turn this off whenever it chose.
In Humboldt County, Nevada, roughly 70 miles north of Winnemucca and just south of the Oregon border, Lithium Americas Corp. is building what will become the largest lithium production facility in the Western Hemisphere. Thacker Pass sits atop the McDermitt Caldera, a volcanic formation whose ancient geology concentrated lithium in clay near the surface at concentrations sufficient to support industrial extraction. The deposit holds 13.7 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent - enough, according to Bechtel, the engineering and construction contractor building the facility, to supply batteries for one million electric vehicles per year at full Phase 1 and Phase 2 output.
The federal financing behind Thacker Pass represents a genuine departure from prior American industrial policy. In October 2024, the Department of Energy closed a $2.26 billion loan to Lithium Americas under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program - at the time, one of the largest loan commitments in the program's history. The loan has a 24-year term and will finance the construction of processing facilities targeting 40,000 tonnes per year of battery-grade lithium carbonate in Phase 1 alone. Bechtel is serving as the engineering, procurement, and construction management contractor; the construction agreement includes a Project Labor Agreement with North America's Building Trades Unions. In October 2025, the Department of Energy restructured the deal further, taking a 5 percent equity stake in Lithium Americas itself and a separate 5 percent stake in the Thacker Pass joint venture - an arrangement Energy Secretary Chris Wright characterized at the time as protecting both taxpayers and domestic mineral security. Phase 1 production is targeted for late 2027.
The project's other anchor is General Motors, which in October 2024 agreed to invest $625 million in the joint venture for a 38 percent ownership stake. GM has secured offtake rights to 100 percent of Phase 1 production volumes and 38 percent of Phase 2 volumes for 20 years, with life-of-mine offtake rights thereafter at market price. Shilpan Amin, GM's Senior Vice President for Global Procurement, framed the investment as both an EV battery play and a matter of broader industrial resilience, citing aerospace, defense, and grid applications alongside automotive.
The construction has not been without friction. Human Rights Watch and the ACLU released a 133-page report in February 2025 finding that the Bureau of Land Management permitted the mine without obtaining the free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples under international human rights standards. The land called Peehee Mu'huh - Rotten Moon in Northern Paiute - encompasses the site of an 1865 U.S. Cavalry massacre of Paiute people, and multiple tribal governments including the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, the Burns Paiute Tribe, and the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute initially opposed the project. The Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe subsequently signed an agreement with Lithium Americas and issued a letter of support, though division within the community remains. The mine's permitting process ran from January 2020 to January 2021, far shorter than the 3.1-year agency average.
While Thacker Pass is the centerpiece of the lithium strategy, the more symbolically significant move came in rare earths. On July 10, 2025, MP Materials Corp. - the only fully integrated rare earth producer in the United States, operating the Mountain Pass mine in California and a magnet manufacturing facility in Fort Worth, Texas - announced that the Department of Defense had agreed to purchase $400 million in newly created convertible preferred stock, a warrant to acquire additional shares, and had committed to a 10-year price floor and offtake agreement for MP's products.
The structure of the deal was remarkable for its breadth. The DoD equity position, if fully converted and exercised, would give the federal government a 15 percent stake in MP Materials - making the Pentagon the company's largest shareholder, ahead of CEO James Litinsky himself at 8.6 percent and BlackRock at 8.3 percent. Beyond the equity, the DoD committed to purchase 7,000 metric tons of rare earth magnets per year for ten years from MP's planned "10X" expansion facility - an agreement providing both revenue certainty and the capital case for a $1 billion commercial loan from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. Separately, the DoD guaranteed a minimum price of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium oxide - NdPr, the rare earth compound used in high-performance permanent magnets - for a decade. At the time of the announcement, NdPr was trading inside China at under $60 per kilogram. The price floor is functionally a government subsidy structured as a market mechanism.
The rationale was stated with unusual directness. Rare earth magnets are components in the F-35, in submarines, in drone motors, and in dozens of other defense platforms. The United States was importing virtually all of them from China. MP Materials CEO James Litinsky described the Pentagon's position plainly: the DoD is focused not just on meeting its own procurement needs but on ensuring the existence of a scaled domestic industry that can operate under any conditions, including adversarial ones. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had signaled in April 2025 that direct equity stakes in critical mineral companies were under active consideration; the MP deal confirmed it as policy.
The announcement sent MP Materials shares up 50 percent in a single session. Within a week, Apple had committed $500 million to MP's rare earth operations, including a recycling line at MP's Fort Worth facility. By November 2025, MP and the DoD had announced a joint venture with Saudi Arabia's state mining company Maaden to build a rare earth refinery in the kingdom - with the DoD and MP holding a combined 49 percent stake and Maaden retaining the controlling 51 percent. In February 2026, MP confirmed it had selected Northlake, Texas as the site for the 10X facility, a $1.25 billion magnet manufacturing campus that will produce 7,000 metric tons of rare earth magnets annually once commissioned in 2028.
The second lithium story from Nevada is less dramatic but strategically important for what it reveals about federal permitting posture. Silver Peak, in Esmeralda County, has been the United States' only producing lithium mine since 1965. It is operated by Albemarle Corporation, the North Carolina-based chemicals company, and currently produces approximately 5,000 tonnes of lithium per year using solar evaporation of brine from non-potable saltwater aquifers. That is less than one percent of global lithium production.
In late February 2026, the Bureau of Land Management approved an expansion of Silver Peak authorizing the mine to operate on 8,058 total acres - including 1,601 acres of public land - up from its prior footprint. The approved plan includes two new transfer pump stations, two weak brine ponds, and well-drilling for new production capacity. New technologies incorporated in the expansion are expected to increase lithium recovery by as much as 100 percent from the same raw material volumes. Albemarle's Ryan Dean said the approval supports efforts to expand production capacity and enhance efficiency; the company called Silver Peak an essential asset for America's domestic lithium supply chain.
The Silver Peak approval was administered as a FAST-41 project - a federal designation meant to streamline permitting for infrastructure projects while maintaining public review. That designation, and the BLM's speed in moving it through, is a deliberate signal: the federal government intends to use every available administrative mechanism to accelerate domestic mineral production. With the Thacker Pass facility under construction and the Rhyolite Ridge project in southern Esmeralda County having cleared permitting hurdles, Silver Peak's expansion completes what is emerging as a Nevada lithium belt - a coordinated geography of production designed to supply a domestic battery supply chain from mine to vehicle.
The domestic investment strategy operates within a broader international framework that the Trump administration has been assembling at speed. The clearest articulation of that framework …