What are critical minerals and why has interest in them grown recently?

What makes a mineral "critical"

A mineral earns the label "critical" when it meets three conditions: it is essential to economic or national security, its supply chain is vulnerable to disruption, and it performs a function in manufacturing that cannot be replaced without serious consequences, whether higher costs for key technologies, slower deployment of clean energy, or risks to defense and communications systems. Think lithium for the battery in an electric vehicle, or gallium, a soft metal used to make the semiconductors inside your phone and every piece of AI hardware.

The US list published in late 2025 names 60 critical minerals, including aluminum, cobalt, copper, graphite, lithium, nickel, rare earth elements, and titanium, among many others. The list is not fixed. It gets reviewed and revised as supply, demand, and concentration of production shift.

Why the urgency has grown so fast

Critical minerals have rapidly moved to the heart of global discussions on energy and economic security, driven by their indispensable role across energy technologies as well as high-tech manufacturing, AI and digital systems, and aerospace and defense.

Three things accelerated that shift.

The clean energy transition. Every solar panel, wind turbine, and EV battery requires these minerals in significant quantities. It is abundantly clear that the energy transition will require a dramatic increase in the supply of critical materials.

Supply chain shocks. The fragility of global supply chains revealed by Covid-19 and rising competition from China have only heightened the importance of supply chain security for critical minerals. What the pandemic did was expose how thin the margin was between normal supply and nothing at all.

China's grip on processing. This is the sharpest edge of the problem. China produces roughly 70% of rare earths and processes around 90%, giving Beijing enormous leverage. A mineral mined in a partner country may still be "critical" if it is refined or processed elsewhere, particularly by a strategic rival. Even if rare earth elements are mined in Australia or the United States, a large part of global processing takes place in China, creating a growing risk to supply chains. China has demonstrated that mineral supply itself can be used as a geopolitical tool.

What governments are doing about it

The shift represents a fundamental departure from the free-market approach that governed global commodity trade for decades. Governments that once left resource procurement to market forces are now treating minerals access as a matter of national security, deploying diplomatic capital, development finance, and trade policy in coordinated ways.

The second Trump administration has put securing access to critical raw materials at the top of the US economic and national security agenda, after the past year exposed persistent supply chain vulnerabilities, with Beijing successfully leveraging raw material dependencies in trade negotiations. Through 2025, the administration introduced a suite of policy tools to accelerate domestic production and processing.

The EU has selected 60 Strategic Projects targeting lithium, graphite, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths, with a growing emphasis on processing.

The honest bottom line: the central issue is not necessarily whether the world has enough minerals underground. The problem is whether those minerals can actually be produced, processed, and delivered through a secure supply chain. That gap between what is in the ground and what governments can reliably get their hands on is what is driving the race.