Rarely a week went by in 2025 without some newsworthy development related to rare earth elements, magnets, and electric motors. IEEE Spectrum was on top of the big ones, starting with the production of industrial quantities of the rare-earth oxides of neodymium and praseodymium at the Mountain Pass mine and processing facilities in California’s Mojave desert.
Between 1965 and the mid 1980s, the Mountain Pass mine produced as much as 70 percent of the world’s annual supply of rare earths, which are used in nearly all powerful permanent magnets. But following a string of reversals and environmental mishaps, the facilities began going into a decline in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, Chinese producers, which were much less confined by environmental regulations, began their astonishingly rapid ascendence.
Today, China controls between about 85 and 99 percent of the global market for key rare earth oxides and metals, on which huge and vital tech-based industries depend. The United States and its allies find themselves at China’s mercy for certain rare earths, including ones that are essential for motors, semiconductors, electroluminescent compounds, optoelectronics, and catalysis. They’re in critical components of countless military systems, such as ones in aircraft, submarines, weapons, and night-vision gear.
For these reasons, the resumption of mass production of rare earths at Mountain Pass, which was greatly scaled up during 2025, was a major development in geopolitics. The total output of the mine and its associated processing facilities, where the rare earth ore is turned into industrially useful oxides, is small, however, compared to China’s output.
The Trump administration invested a lot of time during 2025 trying to set up deals to establish rare-earth supply chains that do not depend on China. This effort started puzzlingly, with some high-profile arm twisting of Ukraine, whose deposits are dismissed by mining experts. And also with overtures about annexing Greenland, a district of Denmark whose rare-earth deposits are enormous but, like Ukraine’s, are not attractive from a mining standpoint. As the year wore on, the administration eventually settled on a strategy similar to that of the Biden administration, which emphasized investing in domestic production and working with allies, such as Australia, to strengthen and expand existing mining, refining, and magnet-making operations outside of the United States.
Mostly overlooked by the administration so far has been Canada (also one of Trump’s annexation targets). Canada has some exceptionally large reserves of rare earth elements, and it operates one of only about four sizable rare-earth-oxide refining plants outside of Asia. That Canadian plant, owned by Toronto-based Neo Performance Materials, is in Sillamäe, Estonia.
Here are eight of 2025’s most popular Spectrum articles on rare earth elements, magnets, and motors, ranked by the amount of time people spent reading them.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images
The Trump administration’s first public move in its long-awaited rare-earths strategy was a head-scratcher. At a White House press conference on 28 February, 2025, where observers were expecting to hear about a Ukraine-U.S. deal involving critical minerals, including rare earths, Trump instead got into a heated argument with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. When the deal was finally signed, two months later, it made no sense to mining and rare-earths experts. Ukraine’s four substantial rare-earth deposits, they noted, were all in or near areas of active conflict with Russia. And two of them are a type of ore for which there are no existing processing technologies.
Michael Tessler/MP Materials
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