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Between June 2 and June 26, 2026, the US government committed close to $2.9 billion in direct federal funding to rebuild a rare earth metals and permanent magnet supply chain outside China, the single largest piece coming through the Commerce Department’s Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) Act rather than the Pentagon.
Over the same five weeks, companies receiving that support layered on a further $1.4 billion of their own capital into the same buildout, the Department of Defense opened its own military installations to critical minerals processors for the first time, and Washington expanded an international alliance aimed at securing supply chains for the technologies that depend on these materials.
The pace and concentration of the announcements, all disclosed within a single month, point to a deliberate acceleration rather than a series of unconnected decisions. What follows maps that funding wave deal by deal, the infrastructure moves that accompanied it and the international dimension that widened it beyond the US alone.
The largest single commitment came on June 2, when USA Rare Earth announced a $1.2 billion investment in a new magnet manufacturing and refined metals facility in Cherokee County, South Carolina. The facility is intended to produce 6,400 tonnes per year of neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets and 5,000 tonnes per year of strip-cast metal and alloy, which the company said would form “the magnet manufacturing centerpiece” of its mine-to-magnet value chain. The same announcement included up to €175 million ($204 million) in additional investment pledged to the company’s French subsidiary, Less Common Metals, and its stake in French recycler Carester.
The following day, USA Rare Earth signed a separate agreement with the US Department of Commerce worth up to $1.6 billion in CHIPS Act funding, comprising $277 million in direct federal funding and $1.3 billion in senior secured loan capacity. The funding is earmarked for the company’s integrated heavy rare earth mining, metal and magnet value chain, including production at its Round Top, Texas deposit, targeted for 2028.
On June 18, the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital issued two loans on the same day: $725 million to Energy Fuels to build a rare earth separation and metallization facility supplying US permanent magnet producers, and $500 million to Phoenix Tailings toward a new processing site called the “Freedom Facility.” Phoenix Tailings said the Department of Defense (DOD) loan, combined with additional private capital, would bring total funding for the project to $1 billion. Both facilities are targeting a 2028 start date.
The Department of Energy’s contribution came on June 22, when its Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) arm announced $72 million for two research programs: one focused on speeding up critical mineral deposit discovery, the other on domestic magnet development. The announcement explicitly framed itself against the DOD’s activity the same month, noting that the department’s loans to rare earth companies had totaled over $1.225 billion the week before.
On June 26, the US Army announced it would allow four critical minerals processors to build facilities on military bases through long-term leases, the first time critical minerals processing has been permitted on federal military installations. Titan Mining subsidiary Empire State Mines will operate graphite processing at Anniston Army Depot in Alabama and Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas. Lithium startup EnergyX will build a plant at Red River Army Depot in Texas. In Utah, Tooele Army Depot will house Ioneer’s boron processing facility alongside rare earth alloy and magnet maker REalloys’ heavy rare earth facility, where the company plans to process dysprosium and terbium.
The Army said the leases are a direct execution of Executive Order 14241, signed in March 2025 to facilitate domestic mineral production for national security purposes. Development could begin as early as 2027, with the Army targeting initial operating capability by 2028. The US is fully reliant on imports for natural graphite, 67% dependent on imports for rare earths, and over 50% dependent for lithium, according to US Geological Survey (USGS) data.
The funding and infrastructure moves were matched by an international dimension. On June 23, the EU, Germany, the Netherlands and Greece joined the US-led Pax Silica Forum, an initiative launched in December 2025 to build resilient supply chains for technologies foundational to artificial intelligence, including the critical minerals and silicon that often run through China-linked supply chains. The forum’s existing members include Australia, Finland, India, Israel, Japan, Norway, Qatar, South Korea, Singapore, Sweden, the Philippines, the UAE and the UK.
The timing is notable given the concentration of Chinese supply in exactly the materials at stake: USGS data cited in the coverage shows China produces 100% of the world’s gallium, 87.5% of bismuth, 87% of silicon, 86.4% of magnesium and 78.8% of tungsten, while a US Congressional Research Service article from June 12 put China’s share of rare earth mining at about 60% and of processing and separation at about 90%.
The geopolitical edge to this buildout sharpened further in the same window. On June 8, the US added 65 Chinese companies, including electric vehicle producers BYD and NIO and battery makers EVE Energy and CALB, to its Section 1260H Chinese Military Companies list, barring them from supplying the DOD. China responded by adding ten US entities to its own export control list on June 22, including rare earth producers MP Materials and USA Rare Earth.
Taken individually, each announcement reads as a discrete corporate or policy story. Taken together across five weeks, they describe a supply chain being assembled in parallel across multiple federal channels at once: Commerce providing the single largest government commitment through the CHIPS Act, the Pentagon financing separation and metallization plants directly through two loans, the Army offering land, and the diplomatic apparatus widening the coalition of countries treating the problem as shared. The Department of Energy’s role, by comparison, is both smaller and earlier-stage, funding research rather than production capacity.
None of the seven announcements mentions a specific end-use industry by name beyond the broader “American industry, defense systems, and allied supply chains,” according to Phoenix Tailings. But the materials at the center of all seven deals, principally neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium, are the inputs for the permanent magnets used in the guidance systems, radar and munitions. The rare earths and critical minerals are also widely used from semiconductors to electric motors, which are supply chains the Pax Silica Forum’s members are trying to secure collectively.
With four of the seven projects targeting a 2028 start date, the test of this funding wave will be whether the capacity it is buying actually reaches production on schedule, and whether the pace of announcement seen in June continues or was a one-off cluster.
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