⚡ Silicon & Steel · Critical Minerals Edition
Part 1 of 3: the chokepoint nobody drew on the map
Ever wondered why a country that mines almost none of something can still switch it off for everybody else?
That is the position China is in this morning, and on 10 November 2026 a one-year truce covering part of it runs out. Most people have never heard of the controls. The consequences show up in electric motors, fighter jets, wind turbines and the fibre running under the Atlantic.
Three minutes. Here is the whole board.
♟️ The chess move
The what:
For three years the West played the technology cold war from the top of the stack: the best chip designs, the machines that make chips, and a tightening list of what China could buy. The assumption was that China would simply fall behind.
China did not answer on that square. It went to the bottom of the stack instead, to the elements every chip, motor, laser and missile starts as, and to the furnaces that purify them. It does not need to own the mines. It owns the processing.
The playbook: Do not fight for the visible end of the supply chain. Take the least glamorous step in the middle, the one nobody wants to build because it is dirty, capital-hungry and unprofitable, and make yourself the only place it happens. Then you set the terms without owning the resource.
Four numbers frame the whole thing.
🔍 The breakdown
The how:
1. Rare earths are not rare
Start by killing the myth in the name. The US Geological Survey puts world mine production at 390,000 tonnes in 2025, of which China supplied 270,000. That is 69%, which is a lot. It also means America is already the world's second-largest producer, at 51,000 tonnes from Mountain Pass and monazite sands in the southeast.
Digging was never the part the West could not do.
2. The leverage is in the furnace, not the mine
Separating ore into individual elements, at purity, at scale, at a price nobody can undercut, is the part. The International Energy Agency puts China's share of rare-earth refining at about 85%, against that 69% of mining. Ore travels to China to become something a factory can use.
The same shape repeats down the list. China accounts for 99% of primary gallium production (USGS), 78% of mined natural graphite and roughly 60% of refined germanium. Antimony is the honest exception: China mines about 36% of it, not the half that gets quoted, though it dominates the refined oxide trade.
Put it on a map and the asymmetry gets starker. The ore comes from four continents. The furnaces sit, overwhelmingly, in two Chinese provinces.
3. These elements are already in everything you own
None of this is exotic. Gallium is in the high-frequency chips in radar, 5G base stations and satellites. Germanium is in fibre and infrared optics. Rare-earth magnets are the muscle inside every EV motor, wind turbine, hard drive and guided weapon. Graphite is the anode in nearly every lithium battery. Antimony hardens munitions and flame-proofs electronics.
Cut the supply of any one of them and a long list of finished products stops moving.
🕳️ The rabbit hole
The where:
1. USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, the baseline data behind every number above [15 min]
2. IEA Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026, where the refining share comes from [20 min]
3. The Nexperia Fiasco, our own piece on what happens when one boring supplier stops shipping [8 min]
📬 Next in this series
Part 2: The Ladder China Climbed
Three years of export controls, one rung at a time, and why the truce paused the wrong half.
Part 3: Can the West Get Out?
The scramble to build furnaces outside China, and what to watch before 10 November.
One question to sit with: if the chokepoint in your own industry is not the thing everybody photographs, what is it?
Silicon & Steel Intelligence Desk, Supply Chain Strategy & Semiconductor Analysis.
Nothing here is investment advice. Corrections & coffee: [email protected]
