IEEE Spectrum’s Top Rare Earth Elements Stories of 2025

Rarely has a week passed in 2025 without a newsworthy development related to rare earth elements, magnets and electric motors. IEEE Spectrum was at the top of the biggest, starting with the production of industrial quantities of rare earth neodymium and praseodymium oxides at the Mountain Pass mine and processing facilities in California’s Mojave Desert.

Between 1965 and the mid-1980s, the Mountain Pass mine produced up to 70 percent of the world’s annual supply of rare earths, which are used in almost all powerful permanent magnets. But following a series of setbacks and environmental incidents, the facilities began to decline in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, Chinese producers, far less constrained by environmental regulations, began their surprisingly rapid rise.

Today, China controls between 85 and 99 percent of the global market for major rare earth oxides and metals, on which huge and vital technology industries depend. The United States and its allies find themselves at the mercy of China for certain rare earths, including those essential to engines, semiconductors, electroluminescent compounds, optoelectronics and catalysis. They are essential components of countless military systems, such as those in aircraft, submarines, weapons and night vision equipment.

For these reasons, the resumption of massive rare earth production at Mountain Pass, which significantly intensified over the course of 2025, constituted a major geopolitical development. Total production from the mine and its associated processing facilities, where rare earth ore is processed into industrially useful oxides, is, however, small compared to Chinese production.

The Trump administration has invested significant time in 2025 trying to secure deals to establish rare earth supply chains that are not dependent on China. This effort began in a surprising way, with some high-profile manipulation of Ukraine, whose deposits are dismissed by mining experts. And also with openings on the annexation of Greenland, a region of Denmark whose deposits of rare earths are enormous but, like those of Ukraine, are not attractive from a mining point of view. As the year progressed, the administration ultimately settled on a strategy similar to that of the Biden administration, which emphasized investing in domestic manufacturing and working with allies, like Australia, to strengthen and expand existing mining, refining, and magnet manufacturing operations outside the United States.

So far, the administration has largely neglected Canada (which is also one of Trump’s annexation targets). Canada has exceptionally large reserves of rare earth elements and operates one of only four significant rare earth oxide refining plants outside of Asia. This Canadian factory, owned by Neo Performance Materials, based in Toronto, is located in Sillamäe, Estonia.

Here are eight of the most popular of 2025 Spectrum articles on rare earth elements, magnets and motors, ranked by time spent reading them.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images

The Trump administration’s first public initiative under its long-awaited rare earths strategy was a real headache. At a White House press conference on February 28, 2025, where observers expected to hear about a deal between Ukraine and the United States covering critical minerals, including rare earths, Trump instead got into a heated argument with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. When the deal was finally signed two months later, it made no sense to mining and rare earths experts. Ukraine’s four significant rare earth deposits, they noted, are all in or near areas of active conflict with Russia. And two of them are a type of ore for which there is no existing processing technology.

Michael Tessler/MP Documents

In 2024, the Mountain Pass mine and refinery plant in the northeastern Mojave Desert became the only producer of rare earth oxides in the Americas after beginning to produce neodymium and praseodymium oxides. The mine and mill had been virtually dormant since the early 2000s, but were rebuilt and rehabilitated starting in 2017 by a new company, MP Materials. In July 2025, MP Materials announced that the US Department of Defense (now the Department of War) was investing $400 million to take a 15% stake in MP, and also guaranteed a “floor” price of US$110 per kilogram for certain rare earth oxides. This price was about double what China was charging at the time for these oxides.

Business Feed

In early 2025, there were numerous announcements from companies touting plans to manufacture rare earth magnets in the United States. The most interesting of these came from MP Materials, which operates the Mountain Pass mine and processing plants in California. MP announced that it had started producing neodymium-iron-boron magnets on a “trial” basis, at a factory in Texas, and could eventually reach 2,000 to 3,000 tons per year.

In mid-July, MP Materials announced a $500 million deal with Apple to begin supplying NdFeB magnets to the computer giant, starting in 2027. Apple uses magnets in the speakers and haptic (vibrating) components of its phones and tablets, as well as in charging connectors such as its MagSafe cable.

Randy Pollock

The math behind using chemical rockets for space travel is grim. They are inefficient, slow and require enormous amounts of fuel. They’re not really up to the task of colonizing Mars, let alone visiting the outer planets. Researchers have long studied alternative means of propulsion, some involving the use of intense magnetic fields to accelerate and direct ions to produce thrust. At Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, researchers have demonstrated such a system, based on applied-field magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters. Their twist involves using a high-temperature superconducting ribbon to significantly reduce the power needed to power the electromagnets to achieve a given magnetic field strength. Hēki, a technology demonstration comprising the system’s new superconducting components, minus the thruster itself, was launched to the International Space Station in September. It was installed outside the station and has been operating continuously since then, said Betina Pavri, a senior principal engineer at Victoria University’s Robinson Research Institute, in an email exchange in late November.

Hinetic

The electrification of airliners faces several very significant technological challenges, including the need for engines with extremely high specific power. Of the different ways to achieve this, one of the most interesting is to use high temperature superconducting (HTS) materials in the motor coils. This is the approach of the startup Hinetics, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and which received funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). In its motors, designed for passenger aviation, Hinetics uses HTS tape originally designed to wind high-power electromagnets used in experimental Tokamak fusion reactors. Based on the performance of the prototypes, the company estimates that it will soon reach a specific power output of 40 kW/kg, much higher than the radial flux motors that now dominate commercial applications in vehicles and industrial machinery.

Airbus

For years, Airbus has aimed to build a large, zero-emission, single-aisle airliner. The centerpiece of this effort was a project to build a specific ultraefficient, high-power motor with superconducting coils. The engine would be powered by fuel cells running on liquid hydrogen. It’s an incredibly ambitious initiative, called ZEROe, and it’s well ahead of anything Airbus rival Boeing is doing. As recently as late March 2025, during a press conference, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury reaffirmed the company’s support for the blue sky project. But he also warned that Airbus does not see hydrogen planes making a substantial inroad into the passenger aviation market until the 2040s, which has been interpreted to mean before the late 2040s.

Donut Lab

Motors integrated into wheel hubs are one of the eternal grails of the electric vehicle industry. They would open up remarkable possibilities, including torque management: the ability to finely adjust power and torque at each wheel to provide ultra-responsive handling. But fundamental problems have long prevented their widespread use. One of them is the need to manage unsprung weight, which refers (in this case) to the mass of the wheels, which are not supported by the vehicle’s suspension and therefore can bounce around on rough terrain and make a smooth ride very difficult. However, with its latest, most powerful motor, Donut Lab claimed a weight of just 40kg and a power rating of 650kW, figures which it claimed made the unsprung weight issue “insignificant”.

Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters/Redux

In 2025, Greenland, another resource-rich and sparsely populated country, has been repeatedly identified as a target for annexation by President Trump and other members of his administration. In a January 9, 2025 interview, Michael Waltz, then Trump’s national security adviser, explicitly linked Trump’s interest in Greenland to critical minerals, including rare earths. However, industrial exploitation of Greenland’s rare earths would require overcoming colossal challenges. To explain them in detail, we called on Flemming Getreuer Christiansen, a Danish mining and geology consultant, expert in research and exploration projects in Greenland.