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    Trump’s $18.6B critical minerals push: rare earths bias and gaps for project teams

    May 11, 2026|

    Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

    Trump’s $18.6B critical minerals push: rare earths bias and gaps for project teams

    First reported on MINING.com

    30 Second Briefing

    US federal critical minerals support under the Trump administration has reached about $18.6 billion across 60 financings, with roughly $15.9 billion in loans, $2.1 billion in equity and $615 million in grants, but BMO Global Commodities Research says the allocation is heavily skewed to rare earths despite their modest $3.5 billion global market. Major rare earth packages include a $565 million DFC facility for Brazil’s Serra Verde, USA Rare Earth’s planned $2.8 billion acquisition of the asset, and a $400 million US DoD stake in MP Materials. By contrast, tungsten projects such as Fireweed Metals’ Mactung and Northcliff Resources’ Sisson have received only about $15–16 million each, with antimony, nickel, cobalt, tantalum and tin seeing minimal support, signalling continued funding gaps for non-REE critical metals.

    Technical Brief

    • Funding is being channelled via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, EXIM, DFC and CHIPS Act.
    • BMO counts 60 discrete project financing instances underpinning the US$18.6 billion commitment envelope.
    • Analysts describe the US as having “hundreds of billions” of potential critical-mineral finance still untapped.
    • Chinese state-led rare earths investment dates back to 1964, with key separation breakthroughs in the 1980s.
    • Global 2024 rare earth sales were about US$3.5 billion versus >US$300 billion for copper.
    • Graphite One could receive ~US$2.1 billion from EXIM, mainly for an Ohio anode plant.
    • Remaining Graphite One funding would support the Graphite Creek upstream project in Alaska.
    • Tungsten’s primary use is cemented carbides for cutting/drilling tools and high-density aerospace and defence alloys.

    Our Take

    The $565 million DFC package for Serra Verde and the prospective $2.1 billion EXIM support for Graphite One are unusually large single-asset exposures in our Policy coverage, signalling that US agencies are willing to underwrite full mine-plus-processing chains for rare earths and graphite rather than just incremental expansions.

    With copper’s 2024 market value (~$300 billion) dwarfing rare earths (~$3.5 billion) and even lithium and uranium, the emphasis on rare earth and graphite projects such as Serra Verde and Graphite Creek reflects a security-of-supply logic rather than market-size optimisation, which could divert concessional capital away from more liquid base-metal markets in Chile, Canada and the USA.

    The focus on Yukon’s Mactung and New Brunswick’s Sisson tungsten–molybdenum projects in the same policy frame as US-based Graphite Creek suggests that North American critical-mineral strategies are being built around a multi-jurisdictional block (Canada–USA) rather than purely domestic sourcing, which has permitting and infrastructure implications for cross-border supply chains.

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    Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.

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