America mined a record 51,000 tons of rare earths — and imported 169% more

In 2025 the United States mined more rare earths than in any year on record — 51,000 tons, about 13% of world output. In the same year, its imports of rare-earth compounds rose 169%. Those two facts are not a contradiction. They are the entire story, and the word “scarcity” is doing a lot of hiding in between them.

Start here: rare earths are not rare

“Rare earths” are 17 metallic elements — neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium, cerium, lanthanum and friends. The USGS puts it plainly: they are relatively abundant in the Earth’s crust. Cerium is more common than copper. The name is a two-century-old accident, not a description of supply.

Three facts make them strategically awkward:

• They make the strongest permanent magnets known.Neodymium-iron-boron magnets are what let an electric motor be small and still powerful — EV drive motors, wind-turbine generators, hard drives, headphones, robotics, guided defence systems. The USGS lists magnets as the leading global use.
• They occur mixed together, in the same rock. You never mine “neodymium ore”. You mine a mineral containing a dozen rare earths at once.
• They are chemically almost identical, which is why pulling them apart takes hundreds of repeated chemical stages. That process — separation — is the hard, dirty, capital-intensive, patent-thickened part of the business.

Digging up the rock is the easy half. The bottleneck is a chemistry plant, and China built most of them.

Who mines it: one country, two thirds of the world

Now the number that reframes the whole debate. If the problem were geological, reserves would be the constraint. They are not — the US has 1.9 million tons of reserves and 3.6 million tons of measured and indicated resources, and Canada has more than 14 million tons of resources. Brazil alone holds 11 million tons of reserves and mined 2,000 tons last year.

The paradox: record mining, record imports

Here is the chart that explains why America can set a mining record and import more than ever in the same twelve months.

For years the standard summary was blunt: the US shipped its ore abroad — largely to China — to be separated, then bought the finished material back. That is changing fast. But look at what happened to the dependency ratio:

Read the last two rows carefully, because this is the part that gets reported as a failure and is not one. Domestic separation more than doubled. Reliance still went from 53% to 67% — because apparent consumption tripled to 27,000 tons. You can build capacity quickly and go backwards on independence if demand runs faster. That is a race, not a retreat.

The workforce tells the same story from another angle: mine and mill employment went from 293 people in 2021 to 670 in 2025. An entire strategic industry, at the mining end, employs fewer people than a large supermarket.

The strangest fact: prices fell while the panic rose

If a material were genuinely scarce, its price would rise. Here is what the magnet metals actually did.

There is one more oddity in the 2025 numbers. Import volume rose 169% while the import value fell, from $168 million to $165 million. The USGS explains it in one clause: a shift toward lower-value imported products. America bought far more tonnage of cheaper material.

So what makes rare earths a strategic problem if they are abundant and getting cheaper? Concentration. A market where one producer holds 69% of supply and most of the separation capacity does not need high prices to be dangerous. It needs only the ability to say no.

Which is exactly what happened in 2025

The USGS records the sequence in its events section, and it is worth knowing in order:

• April 2025. China tightened export controls on rare earths, adding specific controls on the alloys, compounds, metals and oxides of samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium and yttrium — the heavy elements that make magnets survive heat, which is precisely what a vehicle motor or a defence system needs.
• October 2025. The controls were expanded to europium, holmium, erbium, thulium and ytterbium.
• November 2025. China suspended the October controls for one year. The April controls stayed in force, with general export licences issued to selected exporters.

The US response shows up in the same document, in an unglamorous place: the government stockpile table. Potential federal acquisitions for fiscal 2025 included 300 tons of NdPr oxide, 450 tons of neodymium-iron-boron magnet block and 60 tons of samarium-cobalt alloy. The fiscal 2026 plan was not released.

Worth noting what the tariff table says too, because it is the opposite of what most people assume: as of December 31, 2025, rare-earth oxides and chlorides entered the US duty free. Rare-earth metals paid 5%, cerium compounds 5.5%, carbonates 3.7%. The US is not taxing these imports meaningfully — it wants them. The problem was never the tariff; see the note on where tariffs actually landed.

The stock market rode it up, then gave most of it back

Anyone who followed this story through the market has whiplash, and the data shows why. Indexed to September 2024, here are the two most-watched rare-earth vehicles against the S&P 500.

Measured against their own highs, using daily closes:

• MP Materials: $48.83, which is 50.5% below its closing high of $98.65 on October 14, 2025.
• USA Rare Earth: $15.18, 60.8% below its $38.68 close of October 13, 2025.
• REMX (the ETF): $66.66, 39.1% below its $109.53 close of May 11, 2026.
• The S&P 500: 0.8% below its high. The broad market is fine. This sector is not.

And one number to calibrate how violent this corner of the market is: on July 10, 2025, MP Materials rose 50.6% in a single session, from $30.03 to $45.23. A stock that can gain half its value in a day can lose it the same way — and over the following fourteen months, it did.

What this means for your money

This is a policy market wearing a commodity costume. The price of neodymium fell 44% from its peak while the strategic panic intensified. What moves these shares is announcements — export controls, offtake agreements, government purchases — not the spot price of the metal. If you cannot follow the policy, you cannot value the asset.

Drawdowns here are not like index drawdowns. A 50% to 61% fall from a high, in a month when the S&P 500 is at a record, is normal for this sector and abnormal for a portfolio. Position sizing is the entire risk-management story: the same percentage allocation that is boring in an index fund is not boring here.

Scarcity stories take longer than share prices. The buildout in the USGS data is real — 120 tons of separated material in 2021 to 8,900 in 2025, and 293 workers to 670. It is also nowhere near closing a 67% import gap against consumption that tripled in a year. Anyone promising a resolved supply chain on a 12-month view is selling something.

You already have exposure, indirectly. Every EV, wind turbine, drone and hard drive in the companies you own depends on these magnets. The risk in your portfolio is not missing the rare-earth trade; it is owning manufacturers whose input costs and delivery schedules sit downstream of another government’s export licence.

Data appendix

Every figure above with the period it belongs to. The USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries is free to download and contains all the production, reserve, price and trade tables cited here; the price series inside it is sourced to Argus Media.

Mineral data from the US Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (published February 2026; 2025 figures are USGS estimates and are routinely revised in later editions). Share-of-world percentages are our arithmetic against the USGS world totals. Price and equity data pulled September 26, 2026; equity moves are measured on daily closing prices, not intraday highs, so they will differ slightly from the 52-week high quoted on a broker screen. For where options-market conditions stand today, see the Radar.