Building
a US supply chain
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By Emily Forgash and Coco Liu
US President Donald
Trump has vowed to cut into China's
overwhelming lead in producing critical
minerals as part of his national security push,
including a new
supply chain proclamation on Wednesday. In
response, investors are pouring a record amount
of money into US startups, providing support to
an industry that also plays a key role in the
energy transition.
The minerals — a
set of 17 metallic elements — are used in
products ranging from smartphones and electric
vehicles to fighter jets. China controls roughly
60% of the world’s rare earth mining output and
more than 90% of the global refining capacity,
according to an October report by the
International Energy Agency. That leaves
industries in the US exposed
to potential supply shocks.
Venture capitalists
invested more than $628 million in US startups
working on rare earth minerals in 2025,
according to PitchBook data, accounting for 90%
of all funding globally. That represents a
nearly 3,000% jump compared to 2024, and doesn’t
account for government deals, including the US
Defense Department’s $400
million equity investment in July into MP
Materials Corp., a publicly traded rare earth
manufacturer.
US companies
looking to buy rare earths are also showing
increased interest in sourcing the materials at
home. Five days after the Pentagon’s investment,
Apple Inc. agreed to buy
$500 million of rare earth products from
MP.
“Rare earths are
top of mind right now,” said Zachary Bogue,
co-founder and managing partner at DCVC whose
firm backed two US-based rare earth startups
last year. “There’s geopolitical tensions. The
US can no longer rely on China for rare earths
and critical minerals.”
The Trump
administration has taken steps to support
the US rare earths sector for national
security purposes, saying it will guarantee
minimum prices for producers and coordinating
with allies to develop alternative supply
chains. That federal support is making investing
in rare earth startups a safer bet.
These efforts will
also offer a less risky supply of the elements
to green tech companies, which are major buyers
of the materials. Electric mobility, from
vehicles and buses to bikes, accounted for 22%
of rare earth permanent magnet demand in the US
last year, according to Benchmark Minerals,
which tracks rare earth prices and data. The
defense sector, meanwhile, accounted for 12%.
For now, though,
high costs and slow permitting are challenging
rare earth startups’ ability to scale rapidly.
With investors flocking to the sector, there is
also a risk of overheating. Rajesh Swaminathan,
a partner at Khosla Ventures, examined several
rare earth magnet startups last year but decided
against investing. He said the combination of
these startups being at “very early stage” yet
having “super high valuation” made him hesitant
to place a bet.
But James Lindsay,
director of investments at Builders Vision, an
investing platform founded by billionaire Lukas
Walton, pointed to the US oil and gas industry’s
transition from relative irrelevance in 2005 to
becoming a global leader towards the end of the
2010s. The growth of the oil and gas industry
required more capital than what it would likely
take to build out a strong US rare earth supply
chain, he said, and it shows that “a 15-year
cycle has been done before.”
Read the full
story to find out what startups are
leading the charge.
Ever since the
Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, governments
have been trying to nudge big financial players
to move more money into climate solutions. The
idea was to drive action through data disclosure
and net-zero goals, but that hasn’t yielded the
results they hoped for. Have they got
their approach to climate finance wrong? Lisa
Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Center
on Sustainable Investment, makes the case this
week on the Zero podcast.
Listen
now, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube to
get new episodes of Zero every Thursday.
Chisom
Osinachi runs a convenience store in Akanu and
can now keep it open until 10 p.m. after solar
streetlights were installed in her community.
Photographer: RACHEL SEIDU
When night falls
in Akanu in southeast Nigeria, the streets are
lit. That’s something people in the rural
settlement of 100,000 haven’t seen since 2020,
when access to the national grid in the area
broke down and was never repaired.
For Mercy Kalu, who
runs a roadside restaurant, shop and bar,
business is booming. “Our people go to bed
early, like fowl, when there is no light,” she
says. Now “people go to their farms in the day
and come here in the night to pick up their
soap, cream, sachet water and soft drinks. What
I used to sell in a week, I can sell in three
days.”
Solar power is
what’s driving this transformation
across Africa’s most populous nation.
After decades of having to retire at dusk or
rely on noisy, smelly and expensive diesel
generators, local communities are able to take
the energy supply into their own hands, thanks
to the availability of cheap solar panels and
battery storage. In the year to June, Nigeria
imported 1,721 megawatts of photovoltaic
panels—enough to meet 5% of the country’s
demand—up from less than 500MW in 2021,
according to climate think tank Ember. Nigeria
has become second only to South Africa for solar
imports on the continent. (Figures directly
measuring solar deployment aren’t available.)
Read the full
story on Bloomberg.com
Clean energy projects
are poised for a
revival in mergers and acquisitions
activity on the strengthening outlook for
electricity demand and as expectations on asset
valuations converge, according to some of the
sector’s top dealmakers.
Weak oil prices are
making it harder
for the shipping industry to decarbonize,
according to the president of commodities
giant Cargill Inc.’s freight-trading business.
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