Welcome back to CMJ,
As usual, here are the 20-second highlights of what we’ll cover:
MP Materials reported Q1 Materials Segment EBITDA of US$36.7 million, with US$42.3 million of Price Protection Agreement income from the DoW’s NdPr floor doing the heavy lifting. This is the first ‘audited proof’ that the floor produces real cash (the segment would have presented a loss without it), and it changes the cost-of-capital math for every junior pursuing a similar offtake structure.
Australia and Japan formalized a A$1.67 billion critical minerals package during Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s first foreign trip in office. The dollar figure understates what this is: namely, the most concrete piece yet of an allied framework in which sovereign capital, not market pricing, sets the pace of supply chain construction.
France’s Finance Minister proposed an ‘IEA-style’ organism for rare earths, explicitly invoking the post-OPEC institutional template. Whether or not this advances, the proposal alone signals that European policymakers appear to have stopped trying to outwait Chinese price discipline, the strategy is not to engineer around it.
India and Vietnam upgraded their relationship and signed an MoU on rare earths between IREL and VINATOM. The Indo-Pacific is now organizing an REE track in parallel to Pax Silica, raising a structural question Western capital has not yet priced: are aligned blocs converging on shared infrastructure, or competing for the same offtakes? You might already know what our take is.
The NNSA’s transfer of 1.7 metric tons of HALEU from Japan to Y-12 is being celebrated as a historic shipment (the largest single international uranium shipment in NNSA’s history). The more useful framing is that the U.S. advanced reactor industry still depends on transfers from decommissioned foreign research reactors to bridge a fuel gap its own enrichers are not on track to close before the back half of the decade.
Rio Tinto is reportedly considering increasing its 17.2% stake in McEwen Copper’s Los Azules, three months after talks with Glencore collapsed. Read together with prior moves in tier-one undeveloped copper, this suggests majors are quietly substituting M&As amongst them for equity stakes in juniors.
Australia and Japan
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s first overseas trip as Japan’s leader took her to Hanoi, then Canberra.
The Australia visit produced a A$1.67 billion package on critical minerals, with Australia contributing up to A$1.3 billion and Japan A$370 million as an initial tranche, with explicit signaling of additional Japanese capital as projects reach milestones.
The minerals scope includes rare earths, nickel, cobalt, gallium, graphite, and fluorite, strikingly the same ‘basket’ where Chinese processing dominance is most acute.
The Australia-Japan package is the most substantive co-financed bilateral on critical minerals in Indo-Pacific history, and it builds directly on the Australia and U.S. Critical Minerals and Rare Earths Framework signed the previous year.
This is also structurally similar to the blended public finance models seen in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and the EU Critical Raw Materials Act (funny enough, ex-China playbook/incentives are converging across allies):
Government grants combined with strategic co-investment
Deployed to de-risk early-stage projects rather than underwrite completed assets
With sovereign capital treated as the missing ingredient that private markets have systemically underpriced
That has implications the consensus has not yet absorbed.
The cost-of-capital calculus for a critical minerals junior in an aligned jurisdiction now depends less on commodity price assumptions and more on the probability of being absorbed into one of these bilateral envelopes.
Modeling that is probably uncomfortable work, but ignoring it could generate an important missing opportunity (produced by stale valuations).
France
On the other hand, France's Finance Minister, Roland Lescure, has explicitly proposed (in the name of France’s President, Emmanuel Macron) a G7-level body analogous to the International Energy Agency (IEA), created in the 1970s in response to OPEC’s pricing power, but for critical minerals.
Just as a recap, the IEA was a permanent institutional response to a temporary shock.
Proposing the same architecture for rare earths suggests France is not treating Chinese export controls as a crisis to be ‘weathered’, but as a structural condition to be matched institutionally, with stockpiles, coordinated stress tests, and intervention authority at the G7 level.
Again, pay attention to the playbook.
India and Vietnam
The India and Vietnam strategic partnership upgrade (link), signed during Vietnamese President To Lam’s state visit to New Delhi, adds a third vector.
Among 13 agreements, the MoU between India’s IREL and Vietnam’s Institute for Technology of Radioactive and Rare Elements (VINATOM) formalizes state-to-state cooperation on rare earth exploration, processing, standards, and technical exchange.
Worth noting: this is not happening within Pax Silica or the Minerals Security Partnership. This is yet again a parallel framework.
The implication appears to be that ex-China REE infrastructure may not consolidate into a single Western bloc but into multiple overlapping ones: U.S.-led (Pax Silica + bilaterals + DoW price floors), EU-led (Critical Raw Materials Act + RESourceEU + Lacq), and Indo-Pacific (Australia and Japan + India and Vietnam).
The question is shifting from whether the ex-China supply chain will exist, to which ‘bloc’ absorbs which projects, and how the price premium for ‘qualified origin’ will be distributed along the value chain.
We need to keep both eyes open to it! Great opportunities could emerge (but also threats).
Rare earths
MP Materials’ much-anticipated Q1 2026 results, reported May 7, brought the first structural data point of the impact of price floors.
Its NdPr production hit a record 917 metric tons (up ~63% year over year), sales reached 1,006 metric tons (up ~117%), and revenue reached US$90.6 million (up ~49%).
But what really matters, and I’d like to focus on, is their Materials Segment results:
EBITDA of US$36.7 million
Total Revenue of US$114.5 million, considering US$42.3 million of Price Protection Agreement (PPA) income under the DoW’s US$110 per kilogram NdPr price floor
Let that sink in: ~36% of the total revenue was generated via PPA (and if you look closely, over the past 6 months, it accounts for ~46% of the total revenue). This is not a ‘one-off’.
Strip out the PPA income, and the segment would have posted a loss.
Include it, and MP is operationally profitable in the same quarter that the company is commissioning its heavy rare earth separation circuit at Mountain Pass, with management guiding to first terbium and dysprosium output later in 2026, and breaking ground on the 10X magnet facility.
This is relevant because it is the first time the market has ‘audited evidence’ that the price floor is producing positive segment EBITDA in a quarter when Chinese-anchored spot pricing remained well below the floor for most of the period.
And the question becomes what a similar contract looks like for USAR, Energy Fuels, Ucore, and Phoenix Tailings (and others with Sovereign backing), and at what stage of project maturity the DoW commits.
MP’s experience suggests the answer is earlier than the market expects, and conditional on a demonstrated separation pathway.
That, in turn, is what makes the Tanbreez development on the other side of the Atlantic a meaningful counterpart.
Critical Metals Corp disclosed a non-binding term sheet with Tariq Abdel Hadi Abdullah Al Qahtani and Brothers Company for a Saudi joint venture that would refine 25 percent of Tanbreez’s rare earth output in the Kingdom.
This is the second meaningful Saudi and HREE signal in twelve months, after the binding Maaden, DoW, and MP Materials agreement on a Saudi REE refinery.
This list is not exhaustive. It is what can be verified with public documentation as of this writing.
The point of the list is not its completeness; it is the recognition that each entry represents a different bilateral political settlement underwriting the economics.
None of these projects pencils on Chinese-anchored pricing alone. All of them point to the political settlements that produced them.
Two smaller items are worth flagging for what they represent:
Rare Earths Americas (NYSE: REA) closed a US$63.3 million IPO on NYSE American, confirming that the equity capital markets remain open for new U.S.-listed entrants in this thematic
Phoenix Tailings closed its acquisition of Boston-based Machinery Partner, the first publicly announced move tying AI and automation to the U.S. REE refining stack
Uranium
On 7 May, the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), and Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) jointly announced the transfer of 1.7 metric tons of HALEU from Japan’s decommissioned Fast Critical Assembly to the United States.
The material is being reconstituted at the Y-12 National Security Complex for U.S. industrial use. It is the largest single international uranium shipment in NNSA’s history.
The framing in the official communications emphasized partnership and non-proliferation, both legitimate (but our framing would be harder).
The U.S. domestic HALEU supply appears to be constructed, in real time, out of stockpile transfers from allies whose own programs are being wound down.
Centrus, General Matter, and Orano are working toward commercial-scale enrichment in the United States, but published targets for fully commercial HALEU at industrial volumes still point toward roughly 50 tonnes per year by 2035 (in the optimistic case).
In the meantime, the DoE’s HALEU Availability Program was directed by the FY24 NDAA to make 21 metric tons available to industry by 30 June of this year. Five awardees, namely TerraPower, Kairos Power, Radiant Industries, Westinghouse, and TRISO-X, received first-round conditional commitments more than a year ago.
The Japan transfer measurably helps the inventory math (but doesn’t solve it).
Spot uranium at ~US$86.5/Lbs and long-term at ~US$93/Lbs suggests the fuel market is tight and getting tighter.
The binding constraint for the SMR thesis, however, is enrichment, not natural uranium.
Any reader modeling Oklo, Natrium, Kairos, or TerraPower commercial deployments against a 2028 to 2030 timeline is implicitly assuming that the commercial HALEU supply curve catches the demand curve in time. That assumption is becoming more, not less, contestable.
Another contextual and useful data point on the U.S. junior pipeline is Eagle Nuclear Energy (NASDAQ: NUCL), which has initiated pre-drill environmental studies at its Aurora project on the Oregon and Nevada border this week, preparing for a 27,000-foot drilling program ahead of a PFS scheduled to begin in July.
Copper
As reported, Rio Tinto is considering increasing its equity stake in McEwen Copper’s Los Azules project in Argentina (currently at 17.2%, through its Nuton LLC bioleaching technology venture).
Los Azules’ PFS (dated October 2025), estimated a post-tax NPV of US$2.9 billion and projected first production by 2030 at 204,800 metric tons of copper cathode annually for the first five years, is among the world’s ten largest undeveloped copper projects.
Context matters! Rio Tinto’s merger talks with Glencore collapsed in February.
The intervening three months have made clear that majors no longer see consolidation among each other as the cheapest path to copper exposure.
Rio Tinto chief executive Simon Trott told shareholders on May 6 that ‘every dollar must deliver value’ and emphasized that copper, iron ore, aluminium, and lithium remain at the center of the company’s portfolio.
A larger Rio Tinto stake in Los Azules is a smaller, lighter-touch version of the same thesis BHP has been executing. Buy tier-one ore bodies one project at a time rather than buy entire balance sheets.
Questions we should all be asking
If bilateral, sovereign-financed agreements between allied states (rather than isolated national grants) become the dominant mechanism for viabilizing ex-China supply chains, how should juniors in allied jurisdictions be repriced relative to juniors in ‘neutral jurisdictions’ in Africa and Latin America?
If the U.S. small modular reactor pipeline depends on bilateral HALEU transfers until domestic enrichment reaches scale (DOE-estimated 50 metric tons per year by 2035), what is the realistic commercial deployment window for the SMR cohort, and what spread is acceptable between government-supplied HALEU and future commercial HALEU?
If the Mountain Pass heavy rare earth circuit and Tanbreez both produce qualified-origin Tb and Dy within 24 months, what premium becomes payable for non-Chinese tonnage, and where along the chain (miner, separator, alloy producer, magnet maker) does that premium accrue? Is that clear to you?
If Copper majors prefer minority equity in tier-one undeveloped copper projects to outright acquisitions, what does that imply for the discount rate applied to junior copper developers in Argentina, Canada, and Chile relative to those with current production?
Thank you for reading this briefing and for being part of the CMJ community.
In markets driven by geopolitics, foresight is power. If you found this briefing valuable, share it with a peer who needs the same edge (or keep it close and use it to your advantage).
