Tag: export controls

  • Gallium and Germanium: China’s Newest Export Control Weapons and Why Chips Need Them

    In July 2023, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced export controls on gallium and germanium—two metals most people have never heard of, both of which are essential to semiconductor manufacturing, fiber optics, infrared optics, solar cells, and military hardware. Exporters were required to apply for licenses, disclose end-use information, and identify the final destination of every shipment. The result was immediate: Chinese gallium exports dropped from 6,876 kilograms in July 2023 to 227 kilograms in October 2023. Germanium fell from 7,965 kilograms to 590 kilograms in the same period. European prices for both metals nearly doubled within a year. By May 2025, the Rotterdam price of gallium had hit $687 per kilogram—an increase of over 150 percent from pre-control levels. Meanwhile, gallium prices inside China fell, because domestic oversupply had nowhere to go. Beijing was sitting on cheap material it refused to sell, watching the rest of the world scramble.

    In December 2024, China escalated to an outright ban on gallium and germanium exports to the United States, along with antimony and superhard materials—a direct retaliation for the Biden administration adding 140 Chinese semiconductor companies to the Entity List. The ban was suspended in November 2025 as part of bilateral trade negotiations, with general licenses issued through November 2026. But the legal framework remains intact. The controls can be reactivated at any time. The message was delivered: China controls 98 percent of global gallium production and 60 percent of germanium, and it’s willing to use that leverage the same way OPEC uses oil—as a strategic instrument with a valve.

    What gallium and germanium actually do

    These aren’t rare earth elements—they’re critical minerals with their own supply chain vulnerabilities and their own reasons for mattering.

    Gallium’s primary semiconductor application is gallium nitride (GaN), a wide-bandgap material that handles higher voltages, operates at higher temperatures, and switches faster than silicon. GaN-based chips are more efficient and more durable than their silicon equivalents, which is why they’re displacing silicon in power electronics, fast chargers, 5G base stations, radar systems, and military communications hardware. Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is the backbone of radio-frequency chips in smartphones—the components that connect your phone to a cell tower use gallium, not silicon. Every 5G phone on earth contains gallium-based semiconductors. LED lighting runs on gallium compounds. The photovoltaic industry uses gallium in high-efficiency multijunction solar cells for spacecraft and concentrated solar installations.

    Germanium’s niche is narrower but equally non-substitutable. Its high electron mobility makes it essential for high-speed transistors. It’s the material of choice for infrared optical components—night vision goggles, thermal imaging cameras, missile guidance systems, satellite sensors. Fiber-optic cables use germanium-doped silica to minimize signal loss over long distances, which means the physical infrastructure of the internet—the glass cables that carry data between continents—depends on a material that one country dominates. An F-35 fighter jet’s infrared targeting system, the fiber-optic backbone connecting data centers, and the night vision goggles worn by infantry all share a supply chain vulnerability that runs through Beijing.

    How China got here

    Gallium doesn’t occur in nature as a primary ore. It’s a byproduct of aluminum smelting—extracted from bauxite processing residues at concentrations so low that recovery is only economical if you’re already running an aluminum smelter at scale. China produces more aluminum than any other country on earth, which means it generates more gallium-bearing waste streams, which means it dominates gallium production not because it set out to corner the market but because it cornered the upstream industry that gallium falls out of. The same pattern: whoever processes the most bauxite gets the most gallium, and China processes the most bauxite.

    Germanium is slightly more distributed—China controls 60 percent rather than 98 percent—but the refining infrastructure is similarly concentrated. Global annual demand for gallium is below 700 metric tons, a fraction of markets like copper (25.9 million tons) or nickel (3.1 million tons). The small market size is itself a strategic advantage for Beijing: it’s easier to manipulate a 700-ton market than a 25-million-ton market. Small disruptions in supply produce large price swings, which gives China leverage that’s disproportionate to the tonnage involved.

    The controls weren’t random. They were calibrated responses to specific American actions. The August 2023 licensing requirement answered the initial rounds of U.S. chip export controls. The December 2024 ban answered the Entity List expansion. The November 2025 suspension was part of a broader negotiated pause. Each escalation was timed, proportional, and reversible—designed to demonstrate capability without triggering a full decoupling. China has been explicit that the controls are not permanent policy. They’re a deterrent. The message: if you restrict our access to advanced chips and lithography equipment, we restrict your access to the materials those chips are made from.

    The rerouting problem

    The ban is leakier than it looks. Stimson Center analysis of Chinese customs data found that in 2024, the quantity of germanium exported to the United States fell by approximately 5,900 kilograms—almost exactly the amount by which germanium exports to Belgium increased (6,150 kilograms). The combined total to both countries was essentially flat across 2023 and 2024. The material appears to be flowing through third-country intermediaries that reimport it to the United States without Chinese end-use restrictions applying.

    For gallium, the picture is more complicated because Canada and Germany have secondary gallium production from their own aluminum smelting operations, making it harder to distinguish genuine non-Chinese supply from rerouted Chinese material. The U.S. Census Bureau records imports by the country that produced the material unless it underwent “substantial transformation” in a third country—a classification that creates ambiguity about whether Belgian-processed germanium originally sourced from China counts as Belgian germanium.

    The rerouting doesn’t eliminate the vulnerability. It adds cost, uncertainty, and transit time. It creates a supply chain that depends on Beijing’s tolerance of the workaround, which can be withdrawn. And it doesn’t address the fundamental concentration: if China decided to enforce end-use controls across all destinations—not just the United States—the third-country channels would close.

    What the West is building

    The response has been faster than for rare earths but still measured in years rather than months.

    MTM Critical Metals is building a facility in Texas to extract gallium from industrial scrap, scheduled to begin operations in early 2026—an unusually fast timeline for critical mineral projects. The company is reportedly negotiating binding agreements with Indium Corporation that include minimum price floors designed specifically to protect against Chinese market manipulation. Canada’s 5N Plus and Germany’s PPM Pure Metals have secondary production from domestic aluminum operations. Japan has invested in recycling infrastructure to reduce import dependence.

    The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act targets reducing dependency on single-source suppliers. The CHIPS Act allocated funding for domestic semiconductor material infrastructure. But the structural problem is the same one that affects rare earth diversification: building new supply takes years, the markets are small enough that Chinese pricing can undercut new entrants at will, and the byproduct economics mean you can’t produce gallium at scale without producing aluminum at scale, which means diversifying gallium supply requires diversifying an entire upstream industry.

    Gallium prices inside China are lower than international prices because the domestic surplus can’t be exported. If China eventually lifts all controls, the price crash could make every Western diversification project uneconomic overnight—the same dynamic that has killed rare earth mining ventures outside China for two decades. Beijing doesn’t need to maintain the export ban permanently. It just needs the threat of reimposing it, combined with the ability to flood the market with cheap material if Western alternatives get too close to viability. The weapon isn’t the embargo. It’s the optionality.

    What it tells you about the next decade

    Gallium and germanium are test cases for a broader pattern. China identified that its dominance of bauxite processing gave it accidental control of a small but critical material, weaponized that control in response to American technology restrictions, calibrated the escalation to demonstrate capability without provoking full decoupling, and then suspended the controls as a negotiating chip—while keeping the legal framework active for reimposition. Every element in the critical minerals portfolio—antimony, graphite, rare earth processing technology, medium and heavy rare earths—has been subject to the same playbook in sequence since 2023.

    The progression: rare earth processing dominance (established over decades) → gallium and germanium controls (2023) → antimony controls (2024) → rare earth processing equipment and technology controls (October 2025, suspended November 2025). Each step expands the scope. Each suspension is temporary and conditional. The architecture for comprehensive export controls across the entire critical minerals supply chain is built. It’s just not fully activated—yet.

    We cover gallium and germanium alongside the helium shortage, rare earth recycling, and the full landscape of critical materials that underpin modern technology across our Rare Earth Elements course—including why the most strategically important metals in the semiconductor supply chain are ones most people can’t name, produced as byproducts of industries most people don’t think about, and controlled by a country that knows exactly what it has.

  • The Semiconductor Supply Chain in 2026: Why Chips Are Still a Geopolitical Weapon

    The global semiconductor industry is expected to hit $975 billion in revenue in 2026—a 26 percent increase over 2025, which itself grew 22 percent. The combined market capitalization of the top 10 chip companies reached $9.5 trillion by December 2025, up 181 percent from two years earlier. TSMC introduced the world’s most advanced 2-nanometer chip, promising 10 to 15 percent faster speeds and 20 to 30 percent lower power consumption than its 3-nanometer predecessor. And the United States and China are engaged in a technology control regime that a Texas National Security Review analysis compared, unfavorably, to Cold War-era CoCom—the multilateral export control system that tried and largely failed to prevent the Soviet Union from accessing Western technology.

    The semiconductor supply chain was the most globally integrated industrial system ever built. It is now fragmenting along geopolitical lines, and every major government on earth is treating chip access as a national security priority rather than a commercial one.

    The chokepoints

    The semiconductor supply chain has a concentration problem that makes OPEC look diversified. Three American companies—Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Broadcom—account for over 75 percent of advanced chip design. TSMC in Taiwan manufactures 80 to 90 percent of the world’s sub-7-nanometer chips. Two Korean companies, Samsung and SK Hynix, plus one American company, Micron, produce essentially all the world’s high-bandwidth memory. ASML, a single Dutch company, manufactures the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines that are required to produce chips below 7 nanometers—and ASML is the only company on earth that makes them.

    Each of these chokepoints is a potential geopolitical weapon, and several have already been deployed as one. The U.S. began restricting semiconductor exports to China in October 2022, targeting advanced AI chips and the equipment used to manufacture them. Those controls were tightened in October 2023, again in December 2024, and again in March 2025, when the Trump administration blacklisted dozens of additional Chinese entities. The Biden administration’s January 2025 AI Diffusion Rule proposed a three-tiered global framework that categorized every country on earth by its access to advanced chips—essentially creating a semiconductor caste system aligned with U.S. strategic interests. The Trump administration rescinded parts of that rule but imposed its own restrictions. The Netherlands, under sustained U.S. pressure, restricted ASML’s sales of advanced lithography equipment to China. Japan implemented similar controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

    China responded with its own export controls on critical minerals—gallium, germanium, and other materials essential to chip manufacturing—explicitly leveraging its dominance of the mineral supply chain as a countermeasure. The tit-for-tat is ongoing, escalating, and structurally embedded in both countries’ industrial strategies.

    What the controls actually accomplished

    The honest assessment, three years into the U.S. export control regime, is that the controls disrupted China’s semiconductor industry without stopping it. CSIS analysis found that the restrictions created equipment shortages for Chinese chipmakers, produced severe bottlenecks, limited manufacturing yields, and forced workforce reductions across China’s chip sector. Chinese manufacturing yields for advanced chips reportedly run 30 to 50 percent, compared to over 90 percent for U.S.-allied manufacturers. Huawei’s Ascend 910C AI processor, China’s most advanced domestically produced AI chip, is limited to an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 units in 2026 production, bottlenecked primarily by high-bandwidth memory availability. For comparison, U.S. production of Nvidia B300-equivalent chips reached 3.67 million units in 2025—and each B300 is roughly five times more powerful than a 910C.

    But China adapted faster than the controls’ architects expected. Cut off from ASML’s state-of-the-art EUV lithography machines, China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) used older deep ultraviolet machines to produce 7-nanometer and even 5-nanometer chips—behind TSMC’s leading edge of 3 nanometers, but far more advanced than the controls were designed to allow. Huawei reportedly used shell companies to trick TSMC into manufacturing 2 million chiplets for its Ascend 910 processors. China is investing in domestic lithography equipment, recruiting former ASML employees by the thousands, and pursuing alternative chip architectures—including a 2D transistor from Peking University researchers that reportedly operates 40 percent faster than TSMC’s 3-nanometer devices while consuming 10 percent less energy.

    The CSIS report summarized the fundamental problem: chipmaking equipment is heavy, produced in small lots, and hard to smuggle. Chips are tiny, produced by the millions, and easily concealed. Design software can be moved across borders undetected. Export controls can restrict equipment. They struggle to restrict everything else. The Texas National Security Review analysis drew the Cold War parallel explicitly: CoCom did not prevent the Soviet Union from accessing key technologies, and China is a “more adept target” than the USSR was.

    The cost of the controls to the U.S.

    The restriction regime isn’t free for the restrictor. An ITIF economic model estimated that full U.S.-China semiconductor decoupling would cost American chipmakers approximately $77 billion in first-year revenue losses. U.S. semiconductor R&D investment could decrease by 24 percent, or $14 billion. Over 80,000 American semiconductor jobs would be at risk. Korean firms would gain roughly $21 billion of that lost U.S. business; EU firms would pick up $15 billion; Taiwanese firms $14 billion; Japanese firms $12 billion.

    Nvidia has already raised prices on nearly all its AI GPUs—gaming cards up 5 to 10 percent, high-end AI accelerators up 15 percent—citing increased manufacturing costs and tariff impacts. TSMC is considering a 10 percent price increase on advanced wafers. The semiconductor industry was built as a globally interdependent system where each region specialized in what it did best. Breaking that interdependence doesn’t just hurt the target. It raises costs for everyone, reduces R&D reinvestment for the companies leading innovation, and creates market share opportunities for competitors in countries that aren’t implementing controls with the same rigor.

    The geopolitical imperative and the economic imperative are pulling in opposite directions, and no government has figured out how to resolve the tension. Restrict too aggressively and you damage your own industry. Restrict too loosely and you fund your adversary’s military modernization. The U.S. government approved Nvidia to sell H200 AI chips to selected customers in China in December 2025—the same government that had blacklisted dozens of Chinese entities months earlier. The policy is simultaneously hawkish and permissive because the constraints are genuinely contradictory.

    The Taiwan variable

    Underlying all of this is a single geographic fact: the island of Taiwan, 180 kilometers off the Chinese coast, with a population of 24 million, manufactures the overwhelming majority of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. TSMC’s fabrication facilities in Taiwan represent a concentration of strategic capability that has no parallel in any other industry. If those facilities were destroyed, captured, or rendered inoperable by a Chinese military action—or by the threat of one—the global technology supply chain would experience a disruption that would make the COVID-era chip shortage look trivial.

    This is why the U.S. is funding TSMC’s construction of fabrication plants in Arizona under the CHIPS Act. It’s why Japan, the EU, and South Korea are all building or expanding domestic chip manufacturing. The entire reshoring effort is an insurance policy against a Taiwan contingency—and it’s going to take a decade to meaningfully reduce the concentration risk, because building a leading-edge fabrication facility takes three to five years and costs $15 to $20 billion per facility.

    The semiconductor supply chain in 2026 is not a market. It’s a battlefield where the weapons are export controls, lithography machines, rare earth minerals, fabrication capacity, and the strategic ambiguity surrounding a 180-kilometer strait. The $975 billion flowing through it annually isn’t just commerce. It’s the material substrate of AI development, military capability, and economic power for every country on earth—and the fight over who controls it is the defining industrial conflict of the decade.

    We cover the semiconductor supply chain alongside rare earth monopolies, conflict minerals, and the full landscape of critical material geopolitics across our Rare Earth Elements course—including why the most important factory on earth is on an island that one country claims as its own and another has promised to take.

  • China’s Rare Earth Monopoly: How One Country Cornered the Market on Modern Technology

    In April 2025, China imposed export licensing requirements on seven rare earth elements—samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium—plus all their derivative compounds, metals, and magnets. Export volumes dropped roughly 74 percent within a month. Carmakers in the United States and Europe couldn’t get permanent magnets. Some cut production. Some shut down factories temporarily. European rare earth prices hit six times the Chinese domestic price—a spread so wide it essentially constituted an export tax without calling itself one. The International Energy Agency described it as supply concentration risk “becoming reality.”

    Then in October, China escalated. Five more elements added to the control list. Export restrictions extended to lithium-ion battery supply chains, synthetic graphite anode materials, and superhard materials including synthetic diamond. And—this is the part that made trade lawyers lose sleep—China applied the foreign direct product rule to rare earths for the first time. That mechanism, which the U.S. had pioneered to restrict semiconductor exports to China, now worked in reverse: products made anywhere in the world using Chinese-origin rare earth materials or Chinese rare earth processing technology required an export license from Beijing. China wasn’t just controlling what left its borders. It was claiming jurisdiction over what happened to its materials after they left.

    The controls were partially suspended in November 2025 as part of a broader U.S.-China trade negotiation, buying roughly a year of breathing room. But the message was delivered. China had demonstrated that it could, at will, disrupt the supply chains for electric vehicles, wind turbines, fighter jets, guided missiles, smartphones, MRI machines, and essentially every piece of advanced technology that relies on permanent magnets—which is most of them. And it demonstrated this not through a theoretical exercise or a diplomatic warning but by actually doing it, watching the global manufacturing base scramble, and then offering to turn it back on as a negotiating concession.

    The question everyone should be asking is not “how did China get this leverage?” The question is “how did every other country let them?”

    The strategic bet nobody noticed

    The standard version of this story starts with Deng Xiaoping reportedly saying in 1992 that “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths.” Whether he actually said it in those exact words is debated—the original context was a visit to Bayan Obo, the world’s largest rare earth mine, in Inner Mongolia—but the policy direction was unmistakable. China decided, decades before anyone else was paying attention, that rare earth processing would be a strategic industry worth dominating.

    The decision wasn’t about mining. Rare earth elements are not geologically rare—they’re found on every continent, including in the United States, Australia, Canada, Brazil, and throughout Africa and Scandinavia. The name is misleading. What’s rare is the willingness to process them, because rare earth processing is genuinely nasty. Separating individual rare earth elements from ore requires extensive chemical processing—solvent extraction, acid leaching, ion exchange—that produces large volumes of toxic and sometimes radioactive waste. The environmental costs are enormous. The margins, historically, have been thin. And the capital investment required to build a separation facility from scratch is measured in billions of dollars and years of construction.

    China accepted those costs. Starting in the 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s and 2000s, Chinese state-supported enterprises built out the entire value chain: mining, concentration, separation, oxide production, metal refining, alloy manufacturing, and finished magnet production. They did it with lower labor costs, lower environmental standards, and state subsidies that made it effectively impossible for competitors to operate profitably. Western rare earth operations—including the Mountain Pass mine in California, which had been the world’s largest rare earth producer—shut down because they couldn’t compete on price. By the early 2010s, China controlled over 95 percent of global rare earth production.

    The genius of the strategy—if that’s the right word for a policy that also created massive environmental sacrifice zones across Inner Mongolia—was that China didn’t just dominate one link in the chain. It dominated every link. Mining the ore is step one. Separating it into individual oxides is step two. Reducing the oxides to metals is step three. Alloying the metals and manufacturing finished magnets is step four. Each step requires specialized expertise, equipment, and chemical processes that take years to develop. China built all four steps while the rest of the world was content to buy the output. By the time anyone realized the dependency was strategic rather than merely commercial, the dependency was so deep that unwinding it would take a decade at minimum.

    The numbers in 2026

    The IEA’s Global Critical Minerals Outlook reports that for 19 of 20 important strategic minerals, China is the leading refiner, with an average market share of 70 percent. For rare earths specifically, the concentration is even more extreme. China processes approximately 90 percent of the world’s rare earth oxides. It manufactures roughly 85 percent of global NdFeB permanent magnets. It controls a near-monopoly—95 percent or above—in precursor cathode materials and lithium iron phosphate cathode materials for batteries.

    The European Central Bank estimated that over 80 percent of large European firms are no more than three intermediaries away from a Chinese rare earth producer. That’s not a supply chain. That’s a dependency relationship with a single counterparty who has demonstrated both the capability and the willingness to restrict supply for geopolitical purposes.

    The U.S. position is marginally better but not fundamentally different. MP Materials operates the Mountain Pass mine in California—the only active rare earth mining operation of scale in the country—and in 2024 produced a record 45,000 metric tons of rare earth oxide concentrate. Its Independence facility in Fort Worth, Texas, began trial production of sintered NdFeB magnets in late 2025, with a target capacity of about 1,000 metric tons per year. Global NdFeB magnet production is roughly 220,000 to 240,000 metric tons annually. MP Materials’ output, at full capacity, would represent less than half a percent of global supply. The Pentagon awarded a conditional $620 million loan to Vulcan Elements and ReElement Technologies to scale domestic magnet production. Noveon Magnetics is currently the only active rare earth magnet manufacturer in the United States and announced a partnership with Australian producer Lynas Rare Earths to build a domestic supply chain. All of these efforts are real and necessary and collectively amount to a rounding error relative to China’s installed capacity.

    Why you can’t just “build more mines”

    The most common response to the rare earth supply chain problem—from politicians, editorial writers, and people who haven’t spent time understanding the chemistry—is some version of “we have rare earths too, we should just mine them.” The problem is that mining is the easy part. It’s the processing that creates the monopoly, and processing is where China’s advantage is nearly insurmountable in the short term.

    Separating rare earth elements from each other is one of the most chemically demanding industrial processes in existence. The 17 rare earth elements have nearly identical chemical properties—that’s why they’re grouped together—which means separating, say, neodymium from praseodymium from dysprosium from terbium requires hundreds of stages of solvent extraction, each stage achieving only a marginal enrichment. The process consumes enormous volumes of hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide, and organic solvents, and produces proportional volumes of chemical waste. Building a separation plant from scratch takes three to five years and costs over a billion dollars. Qualifying the output to meet the specifications required by magnet manufacturers—purity levels of 99.5 percent or higher for individual oxides—adds additional time and expertise.

    China has spent forty years optimizing these processes. The rest of the world is starting from approximately zero, and the engineers and chemists who know how to run a rare earth separation plant at commercial scale are overwhelmingly in China. You can build the facility. Staffing it with people who know what they’re doing is a different problem.

    The 2010 precedent nobody learned from

    This isn’t even the first time China used rare earth export controls as geopolitical leverage. In 2010, following a territorial dispute with Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, China informally restricted rare earth exports to Japan—the world’s largest rare earth consumer at the time and a major manufacturer of permanent magnets and electronics. The embargo was never officially acknowledged but was widely reported by Japanese importers and confirmed by market data showing a sudden, dramatic drop in shipments.

    The global response was alarm, hand-wringing, and a burst of investment in alternative supply chains that faded as soon as prices normalized. The U.S. opened the Mountain Pass mine back up. Australia’s Lynas Rare Earths built a processing facility in Malaysia. The WTO ruled against China’s export quotas in 2014. China lifted the quotas. Prices came down. And the structural dependency went essentially unchanged because the alternative projects were more expensive than Chinese supply and couldn’t compete once the price pressure was removed.

    Fifteen years later, the same vulnerability was exploited with the same playbook, except this time the controls were more comprehensive, the extraterritorial provisions were new, and the geopolitical context—a genuine strategic competition between the U.S. and China rather than a bilateral territorial dispute—suggests the restrictions will recur regardless of any temporary suspension.

    What the response actually looks like

    The EU passed the Critical Raw Materials Act and launched the RESourceEU initiative for joint purchasing and stockpiling. The European Parliament called China’s actions “coercive” and demanded acceleration of domestic mining projects and bilateral partnerships with alternative supplier nations. Germany committed to €35 billion in resilience and deterrence programs that include rare earth supply chain diversification.

    The U.S. is pursuing a multi-track strategy: domestic mining and processing (MP Materials, Vulcan Elements), allied supply chains (Lynas partnership with Noveon), tariffs on Chinese magnets (25 percent, scheduled for 2026), and stockpiling. The Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency maintains a strategic reserve of certain rare earth materials, though the size and adequacy of the reserve are classified.

    But here’s the honest assessment: none of these efforts will meaningfully reduce China’s leverage within the next five years. The processing infrastructure takes years to build, the workforce takes years to train, the qualification cycles for defense-grade materials take years to complete, and the volumes required to replace Chinese supply are orders of magnitude beyond what any current Western facility can produce. The 2025 export controls demonstrated that China can inflict significant economic damage on the global manufacturing base essentially at will—and that the threat of doing so is itself a powerful bargaining chip that costs Beijing nothing to maintain.

    The rare earth monopoly is not a market failure. It’s a strategic outcome, achieved through decades of deliberate industrial policy, tolerated by decades of Western indifference, and now leveraged with a precision that makes it one of the most effective instruments of economic statecraft in the 21st century. The question of how to respond is real and urgent. The question of whether a response is possible in time to matter during the current geopolitical cycle is considerably less certain.

    We cover China’s rare earth strategy—along with the science, processing chemistry, and geopolitics of 36 critical elements from lithium to uranium—across our Rare Earth Elements & Critical Minerals course. If the foreign direct product rule applied to magnets changed your understanding of how supply chain warfare works, the course goes element by element through every chokepoint.