[CW11] The West’s Rare Earth market architecture is getting real, while Uranium and Copper face the war

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Here are the 20-second highlights of what we’ll cover:

The Action Plan on Critical Minerals, announced during Prime Minister Takaichi’s White House visit on March 19, is the most consequential bilateral mineral agreement since the original U.S.–Japan rare earths framework of October 2025. Where that earlier agreement was directional, this one is operational.

At the center of it are four mechanisms:

Four initial U.S. projects involving Mitsubishi Materials and Mitsui & Co. across rare earths, lithium, and copper are named.

That does not mean the model is frictionless. It raises questions around WTO (World Trade Organization) compatibility, fiscal burden, and how third-country producers outside both the Chinese and Western spheres will position themselves. But the strategic direction is becoming harder to miss.

The company signed a binding LOI with the U.S. Department of War (DoW) for $96 million in purchases of light and heavy rare earth oxides over four years, anchored by a $110/kg NdPr floor. This mirrors the Pentagon’s terms with MP Materials.

That matters because once two cornerstone ex-China suppliers are supported on the same floor, the number starts to look less like an isolated contract term and more like a reference point. ‘The higher the mass, the higher the gravity pull’.

Compared to the previous arrangement, tied to a heavy rare earth processing facility in Seadrift, Texas, which faces execution uncertainty, this new structure is more immediate. In other words, the U.S. appears increasingly willing to prioritize material access now, over domestic processing capabilities later.

That is a pragmatic but also revealing shift.

For all the rhetoric around onshoring, the near-term U.S. actions still seem to prefer allied supply with operating capacity over domestic projects that remain technically or financially unfinished (at risk).

Days later, Lynas announced a second milestone: first production of samarium oxide in Malaysia, achieved ahead of the April target.

This is strategically important. Lynas is now the only commercial producer of separated samarium, dysprosium, and terbium outside China (as claimed by the Company). Samarium does not receive the same mainstream attention as NdFeB permanent magnet, but samarium-cobalt magnets are essential in applications where heat resistance (coercivity) and high-performance stability matter more than cost, especially in aerospace and defense. Lynas’ still plans to have a phased expansion, which will add gadolinium, yttrium, and lutetium over two years as additional products.

Representative Zoe Lofgren, a senior House Democrat, challenged the $1.58 billion financing package backing USA Rare Earth, alleging conflicts of interest tied to Commerce Secretary Lutnick and Cantor Fitzgerald’s role in the company’s capital raise.

Whether the allegations materially alter the transaction remains to be seen. But the episode matters for a bigger reason: it shows how quickly industrial policy becomes politically vulnerable when government financing, equity exposure, and private capital intermediation start to overlap.

If governments want to de-risk projects, they will inevitably sit closer to project capital structures. And once they do, scrutiny intensifies (legally, politically, and reputationally).

USAR shares fell sharply on the news, and even if the package survives, the market now has a clearer view of a risk that was always present: strategic urgency does not eliminate political fragility.

One of the most important market signals to watch from here is whether rare earth pricing continues to bifurcate into two distinct tracks:

If that split deepens, it will change how investors model project economics, how OEMs think about procurement, and how policymakers justify intervention.

GE Vernova and Hitachi’s commitment to build BWRX-300 small modular reactors in Tennessee and Alabama for up to $40 billion, part of the second Japanese investment tranche, is explicitly designed to provide baseload power for data centers.

That number needs calibration. It reflects a multi-site deployment envelope, not a single fully committed project. And no SMR (Small Modular Reactor) has yet entered the U.S. grid.

Still, the significance is real.

Large technology and power players are now openly linking nuclear deployment to future electricity demand growth, especially demand tied to data centers. That is a meaningful evolution in the uranium demand narrative. The sector is no longer relying only on decarbonization logic or traditional baseload arguments. It is now plugging into the infrastructure buildout behind AI.

On the other hand, X-energy filed its S-1 with the SEC on March 20 for a Nasdaq listing, reportedly expected to raise around $300 million.

The timing is notable.

The company filed amid one of the strongest bursts of nuclear policy and corporate enthusiasm the U.S. has seen in years (if not decades). Its TX-1 TRISO fuel facility received NRC licensing in February, the company has access to meaningful DOE cost-sharing, and Amazon remains a strategic investor.

On top of that, X-energy’s LOI with Talen Energy for potential Xe-100 deployment across PJM’s market/grid adds something markets always want from next-generation nuclear stories: an actual demand setting, not just a technology narrative.

Management is effectively telling the market that the current window is open.

Whether public investors agree will depend on how they price long-duration execution risk against the now much stronger political tailwind behind U.S. nuclear deployment.

Iran’s Foreign Minister declared willingness to down-blend the country’s 60%-enriched uranium stockpile, estimated by the IAEA at 440.9 kg. Market implications remain limited for now.

With active military operations still underway and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) warning after a strike near Bushehr, the broader message to uranium markets is that it remains geopolitically unstable around nuclear infrastructure.

The direct impact on uranium pricing may be modest in the near term, but the strategic effect is familiar: supply security becomes more valuable when the geopolitical environment becomes less predictable.

Kazatomprom’s updated expansion agenda and its agreement involving the Balkash nuclear plant only add to this complexity. Uranium demand is globalizing further, but so are the political and logistical entanglements around supply.

Copper delivered the sharpest emotional swing of the week.

On one side, the U.S. unlocked one of the most important undeveloped copper assets in the world. On the other, the copper market itself moved sharply as war repriced risk across commodities and mining equities.

That contrast captures the current copper market better than any single price chart could.

On March 16, Resolution Copper completed the federal land exchange with the U.S. Forest Service, formally unlocking the second-largest undeveloped copper deposit in the world in Superior, Arizona (estimated at 2 billion metric tonnes), after years of legal and political delay.

The significance is obvious.

Resolution is one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits in the world and potentially one of the most important future domestic copper sources for the United States. Rio Tinto and BHP committed $500 million in initial spending, and the project could eventually supply a meaningful share of U.S. copper demand for decades.

But this is not an imminent supply story. Permitting, environmental review, state-level approvals, and tribal consultation remain ahead. Oak Flat’s deep cultural significance ensures that the project’s legal and social dimensions are far from resolved.

Still, the political signal is unmistakable: the administration is willing to elevate copper from a ‘market story’ to a ‘strategic resource story’.

That matters because copper is increasingly sitting at the intersection of defense, electrification, and AI infrastructure. A project like Resolution would have been important under any circumstances. In today’s context, it becomes symbolically larger.

While Resolution moved forward, copper prices moved in the opposite direction.

LME copper fell to $11,690/tonne by March 20, down more than 7% for the week, as the Iran conflict triggered a broad liquidation across commodities and risk assets. Mining equities were hit even harder. Several major names are now down dramatically since hostilities began.

The mechanism is not hard to understand.

Higher energy costs, macro uncertainty, lower confidence in near-term growth, and risk-off positioning all arrived at once. Copper, despite its structural bullish narrative, remains highly exposed to cyclical expectations. When markets start discounting weaker industrial demand, copper is one of the first places that gets repriced.

There is also increasing evidence of softening Chinese demand. Import premiums for copper cathode reportedly collapsed from January levels into late February, suggesting downstream buyers are stepping back.

That does not invalidate the longer-term thesis.

The structural argument (electrification, constrained mine supply, grid buildout, data center demand, and years of underinvestment) remains intact. What changed is the timescale and short-term execution risk.

Lithium was quieter this week, but not absent. It appeared more as a strategic signal than a headline market event.

The first reason is the U.S.–Japan Action Plan, which explicitly includes lithium within its scope (not only REEs). If price floor logic or coordinated procurement eventually extends meaningfully into lithium, that would represent a major shift for a market that spent the last few years violently repricing excess and scarcity.

The second reason is China’s continued progress in next-generation battery materials.

Wanion Advanced Materials announced that it completed laboratory development of lithium sulfide and started building a pilot line targeting June 2026. This is still early-stage and nowhere near commercial scale, but it is a useful reminder that China is not only defending current battery supply chains. It is also pushing upstream into future chemistry.

That matters because lithium’s next chapter may not only be about volume growth, but about quality, specification, and form as battery architectures evolve.

Deep-sea rare earth muds are a strategic placeholder. The U.S.-Japan memorandum regarding Minamitorishima received coverage proportional to its potential (centuries of supply) rather than its timeline (decades to commerciality). It definitely serves the ‘alliance narrative’, but should not be factored into medium-term supply models.

HALEU transport is the invisible bottleneck. NANO Nuclear’s conceptual milestone on HALEU fuel transport addresses a gap that receives far less attention than reactor design. Without licensed transport systems, HALEU-fueled reactors cannot operate regardless of how many are ordered. The gap between reactor commitments and transport certification warrants monitoring.

The Framatome–SCK-CEN LEU conversion is nonproliferation in action. Belgium’s BR2 research reactor converting from highly enriched to low-enriched uranium fuel, supplied by Framatome, is a quiet data point in global nonproliferation efforts, occurring in the same week that Iran’s enrichment program dominates headlines. It demonstrates that reducing weapons-grade material in civilian use is operationally feasible when political will exists.

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