Hardly ever every week glided by in 2025 with out some newsworthy growth 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 Nineteen Eighties, the Mountain Go mine produced as a lot as 70 % of the world’s annual provide of rare earths, that are utilized in almost 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 identical time, Chinese language producers, which had been a lot much less confined by environmental laws, began their astonishingly rapid ascendence.
At this time, China controls between about 85 and 99 percent of the worldwide marketplace for key uncommon earth oxides and metals, on which large and very 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 crucial elements of numerous military systems, equivalent 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 serious growth in geopolitics. The whole output of the mine and its related processing amenities, the place the uncommon earth ore is become industrially helpful oxides, is small, nevertheless, in comparison with China’s output.
The Trump administration invested lots of time throughout 2025 attempting to arrange offers to determine rare-earth provide chains that don’t depend upon China. This effort started puzzlingly, with some high-profile arm twisting of Ukraine, whose deposits are dismissed by mining specialists. And likewise with overtures about annexing Greenland, a district of Denmark whose rare-earth deposits are huge however, like Ukraine’s, are usually not enticing from a mining standpoint. Because the yr wore on, the administration ultimately settled on a technique much like that of the Biden administration, which emphasised investing in home manufacturing and dealing with allies, equivalent to Australia, to strengthen and increase present mining, refining, and magnet-making operations outdoors of the USA.
Principally neglected by the administration to date has been Canada (additionally considered one of Trump’s annexation targets). Canada has some exceptionally giant reserves of uncommon earth parts, and it operates considered one of solely about 4 sizable rare-earth-oxide refining crops outdoors 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 folks spent studying them.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Publish/Getty Photographs
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 had been anticipating to listen to a few Ukraine-U.S. deal involving crucial minerals, together with uncommon earths, Trump as an alternative received 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 specialists. Ukraine’s 4 substantial rare-earth deposits, they noted, had been all in or close to areas of energetic battle with Russia. And two of them are a sort of ore for which there are not any present 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 wherever within the Americas after it started producing neodymium and praseodymium oxides. The mine and plant had been primarily inactive because the early 2000s, however had 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 Battle) was investing $400 million to take a 15 % stake in MP, and in addition 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. Probably the most fascinating 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 ultimately scale as much as 2,000 to three,000 tonnes per yr.
In mid-July, MP Supplies introduced a $500 million settlement with Apple to start supplying NdFeB magnets to the pc large, beginning in 2027. Apple makes use of magnets within the audio system and haptic (vibrating) elements of its telephones and tablets, in addition to in charging connectors equivalent to its MagSafe cable.
Randy Pollock
The mathematics of utilizing chemical rockets for house journey is grim. They’re inefficient, gradual, and require huge quantities of gas. 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 supply 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 facility required to energise the electromagnets to realize a given magnetic-field power. Hēki, a expertise demonstration comprised of the novel superconducting elements 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 electronic mail change 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 crucial fascinating 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 obtained 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. Primarily based on the efficiency of prototypes, the corporate believes it can quickly obtain a selected energy of 40 kW/kg, a lot greater than that of the radial-flux motors that now dominate industrial purposes in autos and industrial equipment.
For years, Airbus has had a high-profile company aim of constructing a big, zero-emission, single-aisle passenger airliner. The centerpiece of that effort was a challenge to construct an ultraefficient, high-specific-power motor with superconducting coils. The motor could be powered by fuel cells working on liquid hydrogen. It’s a breathtakingly formidable 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 help for the blue-sky challenge. 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 outstanding alternatives, together with torque-vectoring: the flexibility to finely regulate the facility and torque at every wheel to ship ultra responsive handling. However basic issues have lengthy precluded their widespread use. One in all these is the necessity to take care of unsprung weight, which refers (on this case) to the mass of the wheels, which aren’t supported by the automobile’s suspension and might due to this fact bounce round on tough terrain and make it actually arduous to offer a easy experience. With its newest, highest-power motor, nevertheless, Donut Lab claimed a weight of simply 40 kg, and an influence score of 650 kW, figures that it claimed rendered the unsprung-weight drawback “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 crucial 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 advisor with experience in analysis and exploration initiatives in Greenland.
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