Not often every week glided by in 2025 with out some newsworthy growth associated to uncommon earth parts, magnets, and electrical motors. IEEE Spectrum was on prime of the massive ones, beginning with the manufacturing of commercial portions of the rare-earth oxides of neodymium and praseodymium on the Mountain Cross mine and processing services in California’s Mojave desert.
Between 1965 and the mid Eighties, the Mountain Cross mine produced as a lot as 70 % of the world’s annual provide of uncommon earths, that are utilized in practically all highly effective everlasting magnets. However following a string of reversals and environmental mishaps, the services 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, started their astonishingly speedy ascendence.
At the moment, China controls between about 85 and 99 % 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 army programs, akin to ones in plane, submarines, weapons, and night-vision gear.
For these causes, the resumption of mass manufacturing of uncommon earths at Mountain Cross, which was significantly scaled up throughout 2025, was a significant growth in geopolitics. The full output of the mine and its related processing services, the place the uncommon earth ore is was industrially helpful oxides, is small, nonetheless, in comparison with China’s output.
The Trump administration invested a variety of time throughout 2025 attempting to arrange offers to ascertain rare-earth provide chains that don’t rely upon China. This effort began puzzlingly, with some high-profile arm twisting of Ukraine, whose deposits are dismissed by mining specialists. And in addition with overtures about annexing Greenland, a district of Denmark whose rare-earth deposits are huge however, like Ukraine’s, usually are not enticing from a mining standpoint. Because the 12 months wore on, the administration finally settled on a method much like that of the Biden administration, which emphasised investing in home manufacturing and dealing with allies, akin to Australia, to strengthen and broaden present mining, refining, and magnet-making operations outdoors of the US.
Largely ignored by the administration thus far has been Canada (additionally one in all Trump’s annexation targets). Canada has some exceptionally massive reserves of uncommon earth parts, and it operates one in all solely about 4 sizable rare-earth-oxide refining vegetation outdoors of Asia. That Canadian plant, owned by Toronto-based Neo Efficiency Supplies, 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 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 Home 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 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 famous, have been all in or close to areas of lively 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 Cross mine and refining plant, within the northeastern Mojave Desert, grew to become 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 primarily inactive for the reason that early 2000s, however have been rebuilt and rehabilitated beginning in 2017 by a brand new firm, MP Supplies. In July 2025, MP Supplies introduced that the U.S. Division of Protection (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 US. Probably the most fascinating of those was from MP Supplies, which operates the Mountain Cross mine and processing vegetation in California. MP introduced it had begun producing neodymium-iron-boron magnets on a “trial” foundation, at a plant in Texas that it will 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 arithmetic of utilizing chemical rockets for house journey is grim. They’re inefficient, gradual, and require huge 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 various 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 significantly scale back the facility required to energise the electromagnets to attain 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 Worldwide Area Station in September. It was put in on the outside of the station and has been operated repeatedly since then, mentioned Betina Pavri, senior principal engineer on the Robinson Analysis Institute at Victoria College, in an electronic mail alternate in late November.
Hinetics
The electrification of passenger plane faces a number of very steep technological challenges, one in all which is the necessity for motors with extraordinarily excessive particular energy. Of the assorted methods of attaining that, one of the vital 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 College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has obtained funding from the Superior Analysis Initiatives Company–Vitality (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 greater than that of the radial-flux motors that now dominate business purposes 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 mission to construct an ultraefficient, high-specific-power motor with superconducting coils. The motor could be powered by gasoline cells working 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 not too long ago as late March, 2025, at a symposium for the press, Airbus’s CEO, Guillaume Faury, reaffirmed the corporate’s assist for the blue-sky mission. 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 that 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 power to finely alter the facility and torque at every wheel to ship extremely responsive dealing with. However basic issues have lengthy precluded their widespread use. One among 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 car’s suspension and might subsequently bounce round on tough terrain and make it actually arduous to supply a easy trip. With its newest, highest-power motor, nonetheless, Donut Lab claimed a weight of simply 40 kg, and an influence ranking 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 nationwide safety advisor, explicitly linked Trump’s curiosity in Greenland to essential minerals, together with uncommon earths. Nonetheless, mining Greenland’s uncommon earths on an industrial scale would require surmounting staggering challenges. To clarify them intimately, 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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