Seventeen obscure metals sit inside every EV motor, wind turbine, fighter jet and smartphone — and one country separates nine-tenths of them. This site tracks where rare earths are mined, separated and turned into magnets, using open data from USGS, the IEA and trade records.
Producing mines, separation and refining plants, magnet factories and development projects. Tap a marker for details; toggle layers below. Circle size ≈ scale of operation.
"Rare earths" are the 15 lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium: chemically so similar they occur together in the same ores and must be painstakingly separated. A handful — neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium — carry most of the market's value. Tap an element.
From ore in the ground to the magnet in an EV motor, rare earths pass through some of the most concentrated industrial chokepoints in any supply chain — nearly all of them in China.
Mining is the easy part. Because the 17 elements are chemically near-identical, splitting them into pure oxides takes hundreds of solvent-extraction stages, radioactive waste handling and decades of process know-how. The IEA estimates China performed ~91% of the world's rare earth refining in 2024 — and until Lynas started in 2025, essentially 100% of heavy-rare-earth separation.
Bayan Obo's light-REE concentrate feeds the world's largest processing complex at Baotou, Inner Mongolia — separation, metal-making and magnet alloys at a scale no other country approaches, run by China Northern Rare Earth.
Ion-adsorption clays across Jiangxi and neighbouring provinces yield the heavy rare earths (Dy, Tb). Separation clusters around Ganzhou under the state-owned China Rare Earth Group — along with a costly legacy of in-situ leaching pollution.
Lynas (Kuantan, Malaysia — most of it), Solvay's La Rochelle (France), Neo's Silmet (Estonia), Energy Fuels' White Mesa (Utah) and MP's Mountain Pass. New capacity is coming: Caremag (France), REEtec (Norway), Ucore (Louisiana), Iluka's Eneabba refinery (Australia, 2027).
In December 2023 China banned the export of rare-earth extraction, separation and magnet-making technology. The 2025 export controls then weaponised the separation chokepoint itself — licences now gate every shipment of controlled heavy rare earths.
Permanent magnets are the leading global end use of rare earths and carry most of the market's value. Sintered NdFeB — neodymium-iron-boron, doped with dysprosium or terbium for heat tolerance — is the strongest magnet ever commercialised, and there is no drop-in substitute.
A typical EV traction motor uses roughly 1–3 kg of NdFeB magnets. Most EVs on the road use permanent-magnet motors — the biggest single driver of rare earth demand growth.
Direct-drive offshore turbines carry the largest magnets of all — on the order of 600 kg of NdFeB per megawatt, several tonnes per turbine.
Speakers, haptics, camera autofocus, hard-disk actuators: grams per device, but billions of devices. Apple alone signed a $500M deal for US-made recycled magnets.
Every joint in a humanoid robot is a magnet motor. Robotics and drones are widely projected to be the next structural source of NdFeB demand after EVs.
Rare earths went from trade commodity to geopolitical instrument. What began as a two-month embargo against Japan in 2010 became, by 2025, a licensing regime covering half the periodic table's bottom row.
After a fishing-boat collision near the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, China halts rare earth shipments to Japan for about two months. Prices spike as much as tenfold; Japan bankrolls Lynas to build the first major ex-China supply chain.
The US, EU and Japan win a WTO case against China's rare earth export quotas. China scraps them — but keeps production quotas and consolidates the industry into state-owned groups.
China bans the export of rare-earth extraction, separation and magnet-manufacturing technology — locking in the know-how moat just as Western separation projects seek engineers and flowsheets.
Answering US tariffs, China imposes export licences on samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium — and on magnets containing them. Shipments stall for weeks; Ford halts an Explorer line in Chicago; automakers worldwide fly in engineers to redesign around missing magnets.
A London framework restarts licence approvals for civilian users. The US Department of Defense takes a $400M stake in MP Materials with a $110/kg NdPr price floor and a 10-year magnet offtake — the Pentagon becomes a rare earth investor.
China adds europium, holmium, erbium, thulium and ytterbium — all heavy rare earths — plus an extraterritorial rule covering foreign-made goods containing Chinese rare earth content, and controls on magnet-making equipment. The escalation lands weeks before the APEC summit.
After the Trump–Xi meeting, China suspends the October package for one year (to 10 November 2026). The April controls stay in force, with "general licences" issued to selected exporters for civilian trade.
Civilian flows resume under general licences, but defence-linked buyers remain effectively embargoed. Outside China, dysprosium trades around 4–5× and yttrium at over 100× Chinese domestic prices — a standing subsidy for every ex-China separation project.
The US now mines more rare earths than it did at any point since the 1990s — yet still imported 67% of the compounds and metals it consumed in 2025, and 100% of its heavy rare earths.
$239/kg average in 2025 (Chinese FOB) → roughly $1,450/kg outside China by May 2026.
$1,010/kg average in 2025 → around $4,500/kg outside China by May 2026.
A cheap workhorse — until controls hit. Ex-China prices rose over 100-fold, approaching $1,100/kg in May 2026.
Never controlled, but rallying anyway: Chinese NdPr alloy hit ~$133/kg in July 2026, up over 80% year-on-year, as magnet demand outruns quota growth.
Kachin State's ion-adsorption clay mines — over 300 sites, up from ~130 in 2020 — supply the bulk of China's imported heavy-rare-earth feedstock, an estimated 22,000 t REO in 2025. Since October 2024 the mining belt has been controlled by the Kachin Independence Army, which taxes exports at a negotiated ~35,000 yuan per tonne. Every border closure and levy dispute whipsaws the dysprosium and terbium supply that the world's EV motors depend on.
Concentration deepens at every step downstream from the mine — and the IEA expects China to remain the dominant refiner well into the 2030s, even if every announced Western project delivers.
of the world's rare earth refining happened in China in 2024 (IEA). Its estimated share along the mine-to-magnet chain:
Precision-guided weapons, radar, sonar, jet engines and night vision all depend on rare earths — which is why China's export-control rules explicitly target defence supply chains, and why the Pentagon has become the industry's anchor investor.
An F-35 contains roughly 400 kg of rare earth materials — in magnets for actuators and generators, radar components and engine coatings. Yttria thermal-barrier coatings keep turbine blades alive.
A Virginia-class submarine carries an estimated 4+ tonnes of rare earth materials. Sonar transducers use Terfenol-D, a terbium-dysprosium-iron alloy with no substitute.
Samarium-cobalt magnets drive fin actuators and seekers in precision-guided munitions — they keep working at temperatures where NdFeB fails, which is why samarium led China's April 2025 control list.
Nd:YAG rangefinders and target designators, erbium and holmium battlefield lasers, lanthanum in night-vision optics — rare earth photonics run modern targeting.
The US National Defense Stockpile's FY2025 shopping list included 300 t of NdPr oxide, 450 t of NdFeB magnet block and 60 t of samarium-cobalt alloy (USGS).
China's 2026 general export licences ease civilian trade — but defence-linked end users remain effectively embargoed, leaving Western primes reliant on stockpiles and the still-tiny ex-China heavy-rare-earth supply.
2025–26 rewired the sector: for the first time, Western governments stopped writing reports and started writing cheques — equity, price floors and offtakes. Four places where capital is concentrating — presented as observation, not investment advice.
The DoD's MP Materials package — $400M of equity, a $110/kg NdPr floor and a 10-year magnet offtake — created a template: Washington has since extended a $96M purchase intent to Lynas on similar terms, plus loans for heavy separation and recycling.
Well over $2B is flowing into US magnet plants: MP's $1.25B 10X campus in Texas (Apple-anchored), e-VAC's Sumter plant, USA Rare Earth's Stillwater, Noveon's San Marcos. Qualification with automakers and primes still takes years.
Dysprosium and terbium at 4–5× Chinese prices make heavy separation the scarcest, best-rewarded asset: Lynas Malaysia, MP's DoW-funded circuit, Caremag in France, Serra Verde's $465M DFC loan in Brazil, and Ucore's Louisiana plant all chase it.
NdPr prices are still set in China and can be flooded at will; ionic-clay economics are unproven outside Asia; the Busan truce could reverse either way; most Western projects only pencil with policy support — remove the floor and the old cycle returns.
Producers, separators, magnet makers and developers across the chain. In China two state groups control mining quotas; the concentration deepens downstream, where a handful of magnet makers supply the world. Filter by segment or search.
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No — cerium is about as abundant in the Earth's crust as copper. What is rare is finding them concentrated enough to mine economically, and the industrial capacity to separate 17 chemically near-identical elements from each other. The whole world mined only about 390,000 tonnes of rare-earth oxide in 2025.
China mined about 270,000 of the world's 390,000 tonnes of rare-earth oxide in 2025 — roughly 69% — according to USGS estimates. Much of the rest, including Myanmar's heavy-rare-earth output, is still refined in China.
The IEA estimates China performed about 91% of the world's rare earth refining and made about 94% of sintered NdFeB magnets in 2024. Decades of state investment, tolerance of the radioactive and chemical waste from separation, the scale of Bayan Obo, and a 2023 ban on exporting separation and magnet-making technology all entrench the position.
The leading global use is permanent magnets — NdFeB magnets in EV motors, wind turbines, electronics and defence systems. Other uses include catalysts, polishing, phosphors, lasers, fibre optics and medical imaging.
In April 2025 China imposed export licences on samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium and on magnets containing them, briefly halting car production lines worldwide. An October 2025 expansion was suspended for one year in November, but the April controls remain, and outside China dysprosium and terbium have traded at four to five times Chinese domestic prices.
We produce bespoke, source-cited research on rare earths and other strategic minerals — supply-chain mapping, trade-flow analysis, country and commodity deep-dives — built on the same open data behind this dashboard.
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