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 prime of the massive ones, beginning with the manufacturing of commercial portions of the rare-earth oxides of neodymium and praseodymium on the Mountain Pass mine and processing services in California’s Mojave desert.
Between 1965 and the mid Nineteen Eighties, the Mountain Cross 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 services started going right into a decline within the 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.
At present, China controls between about 85 and 99 percent of the worldwide marketplace for key uncommon earth oxides and metals, on which enormous 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 are important for motors, semiconductors, electroluminescent compounds, optoelectronics, and catalysis. They’re in vital parts of numerous military systems, resembling 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 during 2025, was a serious improvement in geopolitics. The whole output of the mine and its related processing services, the place the uncommon earth ore is changed into industrially helpful oxides, is small, nevertheless, in comparison with China’s output.
The Trump administration invested quite a lot of time throughout 2025 attempting to arrange offers to ascertain rare-earth provide chains that don’t rely on China. This effort started puzzlingly, with some high-profile arm twisting of Ukraine, whose deposits are dismissed by mining consultants. And in addition with overtures about annexing Greenland, a district of Denmark whose rare-earth deposits are huge however, like Ukraine’s, will not be engaging from a mining standpoint. Because the 12 months wore on, the administration ultimately settled on a method much like that of the Biden administration, which emphasised investing in home manufacturing and dealing with allies, resembling Australia, to strengthen and develop current mining, refining, and magnet-making operations exterior of america.
Largely ignored by the administration up to now has been Canada (additionally one in all Trump’s annexation targets). Canada has some exceptionally giant reserves of uncommon earth parts, and it operates one in all solely about 4 sizable rare-earth-oxide refining vegetation exterior of Asia. That Canadian plant, owned by Toronto-based Neo Performance Materials, is in Sillamäe, Estonia.
Listed here 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 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 have been anticipating to listen to a couple of Ukraine-U.S. deal involving vital minerals, together with uncommon earths, Trump as an alternative obtained 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 aren’t any current 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 Materials. In July 2025, MP Supplies introduced that the U.S. Department of Defense (now the Division of Warfare) was investing $400 million to take a 15 % stake in MP, and in addition guaranteeing a value “ground” of US $110 per kilogram for sure uncommon earth oxides. That value 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 america. 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 could ultimately 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 resembling its MagSafe cable.
Randy Pollock
The mathematics of utilizing chemical rockets for house journey is grim. They’re inefficient, sluggish, 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 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 relies on applied-field magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters. Their twist is utilizing high-temperature superconducting tape to significantly cut back the ability required to energise the electromagnets to attain a given magnetic-field power. 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, mentioned 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, one in all which is the necessity for motors with extraordinarily excessive particular energy. Of the varied methods of reaching that, probably the most 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 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 would quickly obtain a particular energy of 40 kW/kg, a lot larger than that of the radial-flux motors that now dominate business purposes in autos 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 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 assist 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 exceptional alternatives, together with torque-vectoring: the flexibility to finely alter the ability and torque at every wheel to ship ultra responsive handling. However elementary issues have lengthy precluded their widespread use. One in all 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 due to this fact bounce round on tough terrain and make it actually laborious to supply 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 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 vital 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 marketing consultant with experience in analysis and exploration initiatives in Greenland.
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