Hardly ever per week glided by in 2025 with out some newsworthy improvement associated to rare earth elements, magnets, and electric motors. IEEE Spectrum was on high of the large ones, beginning with the manufacturing of business portions of the rare-earth oxides of neodymium and praseodymium on the Mountain Pass mine and processing amenities in California’s Mojave desert.
Between 1965 and the mid Eighties, the Mountain Go mine produced as a lot as 70 p.c of the world’s annual provide of rare earths, that are utilized in practically all highly effective permanent magnets. However following a string of reversals and environmental mishaps, the amenities started going right into a decline within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s. On the similar time, Chinese language producers, which have been a lot much less confined by environmental laws, began their astonishingly rapid ascendence.
As we speak, China controls between about 85 and 99 percent of the worldwide marketplace for key uncommon earth oxides and metals, on which big and important tech-based industries rely. The United States and its allies discover themselves at China’s mercy for sure uncommon earths, together with ones which can be important for motors, semiconductors, electroluminescent compounds, optoelectronics, and catalysis. They’re in essential parts of numerous military systems, akin to ones in plane, submarines, weapons, and night-vision gear.
For these causes, the resumption of mass manufacturing of uncommon earths at Mountain Go, which was enormously scaled up during 2025, was a significant improvement in geopolitics. The entire output of the mine and its related processing amenities, the place the uncommon earth ore is was industrially helpful oxides, is small, nonetheless, in comparison with China’s output.
The Trump administration invested loads of time throughout 2025 making an attempt to arrange offers to ascertain rare-earth provide chains that don’t rely upon China. This effort started puzzlingly, with some high-profile arm twisting of Ukraine, whose deposits are dismissed by mining consultants. And likewise with overtures about annexing Greenland, a district of Denmark whose rare-earth deposits are monumental however, like Ukraine’s, aren’t enticing from a mining standpoint. Because the 12 months wore on, the administration finally settled on a technique much like that of the Biden administration, which emphasised investing in home manufacturing and dealing with allies, akin to Australia, to strengthen and increase current mining, refining, and magnet-making operations exterior of the USA.
Largely ignored by the administration thus far has been Canada (additionally considered one of Trump’s annexation targets). Canada has some exceptionally massive reserves of uncommon earth parts, and it operates considered one of solely about 4 sizable rare-earth-oxide refining crops exterior of Asia. That Canadian plant, owned by Toronto-based Neo Performance Materials, is in Sillamäe, Estonia.
Listed below are eight of 2025’s hottest Spectrum articles on uncommon earth parts, magnets, and motors, ranked by the period of time individuals spent studying them.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Put up/Getty Pictures
The Trump administration’s first public transfer in its long-awaited rare-earths technique was a head-scratcher. At a White House press convention on 28 February, 2025, the place observers have been anticipating to listen to a few Ukraine-U.S. deal involving essential minerals, together with uncommon earths, Trump as a substitute bought right into a heated argument with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. When the deal was lastly signed, two months later, it made no sense to mining and rare-earths consultants. Ukraine’s 4 substantial rare-earth deposits, they noted, have been all in or close to areas of lively battle with Russia. And two of them are a kind of ore for which there are not any current processing applied sciences.
Michael Tessler/MP Supplies
In 2024, the Mountain Go mine and refining plant, within the northeastern Mojave Desert, turned the one producer of rare-earth oxides anyplace within the Americas after it started producing neodymium and praseodymium oxides. The mine and plant had been basically inactive because the early 2000s, however have been rebuilt and rehabilitated beginning in 2017 by a brand new firm, MP Materials. In July 2025, MP Supplies introduced that the U.S. Department of Defense (now the Division of Conflict) was investing $400 million to take a 15 p.c stake in MP, and likewise guaranteeing a worth “flooring” of US $110 per kilogram for sure uncommon earth oxides. That worth was roughly twice what China was charging on the time for these oxides.
Enterprise Wire
Early in 2025, there was a flurry of bulletins from firms touting plans to fabricate rare-earth magnets in the USA. Essentially the most attention-grabbing of those was from MP Supplies, which operates the Mountain Go mine and processing crops in California. MP introduced it had begun producing neodymium-iron-boron magnets on a “trial” foundation, at a plant in Texas that it could finally scale as much as 2,000 to three,000 tonnes per 12 months.
In mid-July, MP Supplies introduced a $500 million settlement with Apple to start supplying NdFeB magnets to the pc big, beginning in 2027. Apple makes use of magnets within the audio system and haptic (vibrating) parts of its telephones and tablets, in addition to in charging connectors akin to its MagSafe cable.
Randy Pollock
The mathematics of utilizing chemical rockets for house journey is grim. They’re inefficient, gradual, and require monumental quantities of gasoline. They’re not likely as much as the duty of colonizing Mars, not to mention visiting the outer planets. So researchers have lengthy investigated different technique of propulsion, some involving the usage of intense magnetic fields to speed up and direct ions to provide thrust. At Victoria College in Wellington, New Zealand, researchers have demonstrated one such system, which is predicated on applied-field magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters. Their twist is utilizing high-temperature superconducting tape to enormously cut back the ability required to energise the electromagnets to realize a given magnetic-field energy. Hēki, a expertise demonstration comprised of the novel superconducting parts of the system, minus the thruster itself, was launched to the International Space Station in September. It was put in on the outside of the station and has been operated constantly since then, stated Betina Pavri, senior principal engineer on the Robinson Analysis Institute at Victoria College, in an e mail alternate in late November.
Hinetics
The electrification of passenger plane faces a number of very steep technological challenges, considered one of which is the necessity for motors with extraordinarily excessive particular energy. Of the assorted methods of attaining that, one of the vital attention-grabbing is thru the usage of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) supplies within the coils of the motor. That’s the strategy of startup Hinetics, which was spun out of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has acquired funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E). In its motors, designed with passenger aviation in thoughts, Hinetics is utilizing HTS tape initially designed for winding the high-power electromagnets utilized in experimental Tokamak fusion reactors. Based mostly on the efficiency of prototypes, the corporate believes it is going to quickly obtain a particular energy of 40 kW/kg, a lot increased than that of the radial-flux motors that now dominate business functions in automobiles and industrial equipment.
For years, Airbus has had a high-profile company purpose of constructing a big, zero-emission, single-aisle passenger airliner. The centerpiece of that effort was a venture to construct an ultraefficient, high-specific-power motor with superconducting coils. The motor can be powered by fuel cells operating on liquid hydrogen. It’s a breathtakingly bold initiative, referred to as ZEROe, and it’s far forward of something Airbus’s rival Boeing is doing. As just lately as late March, 2025, at a symposium for the press, Airbus’s CEO, Guillaume Faury, reaffirmed the corporate’s assist for the blue-sky venture. However he additionally cautioned that Airbus doesn’t see hydrogen-powered planes making substantial inroads into the passenger aviation market earlier than the 2040s, which was interpreted as which means earlier than the late 2040s.
Donut Lab
In-wheel hub motors are one of many perennial grails of the electric-vehicle business. They’d unleash exceptional alternatives, together with torque-vectoring: the flexibility to finely regulate the ability and torque at every wheel to ship ultra responsive handling. However elementary issues have lengthy precluded their widespread use. One in every of these is the necessity to cope with unsprung weight, which refers (on this case) to the mass of the wheels, which aren’t supported by the car’s suspension and might subsequently bounce round on tough terrain and make it actually onerous to supply a clean trip. With its newest, highest-power motor, nonetheless, Donut Lab claimed a weight of simply 40 kg, and an influence score of 650 kW, figures that it claimed rendered the unsprung-weight downside “insignificant.”
Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters/Redux
Throughout 2025, Greenland, one other resource-rich, sparsely populated nation, was repeatedly recognized as an annexation goal by President Trump and different members of his administration. In an interview on 9 January, 2025, Michael Waltz, then Trump’s national security advisor, explicitly linked Trump’s curiosity in Greenland to essential minerals, together with uncommon earths. Nevertheless, mining Greenland’s uncommon earths on an industrial scale would require surmounting staggering challenges. To explain them in detail, we referred to as on Flemming Getreuer Christiansen, a Danish mining and geology guide with experience in analysis and exploration initiatives in Greenland.
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