Two things happened five months apart, and read together they say something the press releases do not say separately: the United States government has stopped waiting for a market to appear and started being one.
First, the buying
In October 2025 the Financial Times reported, from public Defense Logistics Agency filings, that the DLA had moved to buy up to $1 billion of critical minerals for the national stockpile. The split, as reported:
- $500 million — cobalt
- $245 million — antimony
- $100 million — tantalum
- $45 million — scandium
Named suppliers in the reporting included US Antimony for the antimony, and Rio Tinto and the Illinois firm APL Engineered Materials for scandium; the tantalum supplier was not disclosed. The money traces to the critical minerals allocation in the 2025 reconciliation act, reported at $7.5 billion in total, of which about $2 billion is for expanding the stockpile.
A stockpile purchase is the bluntest instrument in this whole area. It does not build anything. What it does is put a floor under demand for material that already exists, which is worth something to a producer deciding whether to restart a line.
Then, the building
The more interesting document is the second one. On 27 February 2026 the Defense Industrial Base Consortium issued a request for project proposals on critical minerals, under Other Transaction Authority (10 U.S.C. § 4022) through the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Industrial Base Policy. Awards were described as potentially ranging from roughly $100 million to more than $500 million, with proposals due 20 March 2026.
Thirteen minerals were named: arsenic, bismuth, gadolinium, germanium, graphite, hafnium, nickel, samarium, tungsten, vanadium, ytterbium, yttrium and zirconium.
But the part worth reading twice is the list of what the money is for. Raw mineral sourcing and beneficiation. Separation and processing technologies. Metal production and refining. Alloying and finishing processing. Recycling and recovery. Supporting supply chain infrastructure.
Five of those six categories are the middle of the chain. Only the first is mining. A government that believed the problem was a shortage of American ore would not write a solicitation that spends most of its scope on what happens to the ore afterwards.
And the cheque-writing has continued
On 7 August 2026 the White House published a list of further commitments: $1.4 billion to Sila Nanotechnologies for silicon-carbon battery anodes, $400 million to Sunrise Energy Metals, $150 million to Niron Magnetics, $85 million to Strategic Bauxite, $80 million and $100 million respectively to mining schools, and smaller Export-Import Bank positions in 5E Advanced Materials, Westwater Resources and Global Advanced Materials. The same fact sheet claims 160 minerals deals worth almost $40 billion since January 2025 — that figure is the administration’s own count, stated here as their claim rather than as an audited number.
What this changes
If you are a processor, a refiner, a separation plant or a recycler, the federal government is now a plausible first customer and a plausible co-investor, and the instruments are public with deadlines attached. That was not true three years ago.
Two cautions. Other Transaction Authority awards are not conventional procurement — the terms are negotiated, and a firm without someone who has done one before is at a disadvantage. And a stockpile purchase is demand for a year, not a market for a decade; the plants this is meant to call into existence take longer to build than the appropriations that fund them tend to last.
