Executive summary (20-second highlights):

One position, two percentages. The Tungsten producer the United States bought into this week published 24.84% in its filing and 19.9% in its press release, and both numbers are correct
Canada's sovereign fund paid for a Copper mine and stopped at 19.9%. A Swiss trader walked away with every tonne of the concentrate for at least fourteen years
Brazil signed a law that can block the sale of a mine, thirteen days after an American buyer finished buying the country's only commercial rare earths producer
China's state rare earths champion is reportedly buying a controlling stake in the company that sits on MP Materials' share register, where the United States is already the largest shareholder
A US$414.2M Uranium loan was approved this week. Its first condition is finding a road out of the country
The instrument the United States used on Tungsten appears in three documents in the entire 2026 securities disclosure record. We pulled the count ourselves, and it names one company

Illustration of Glencore’s Headquarters

The week the state joined the cap table

Start with what is already obvious: for two years, Western governments have been putting money into critical minerals.

We’ve seen it all. Grants, loans, letters of interest, stockpile contracts, price floors, etc.

The pattern is familiar enough that most CMJ readers have stopped reading the individual announcements and track only the total at this point.

This week broke the pattern, though, and it broke it in the same direction in four countries at once (coincidence, right?).

On September 14th, 2026, the United States Department of War (DoW) closed an investment in The Elmet Group, a Maine-based producer that the department describes as the only US-owned, fully integrated producer of Tungsten and Molybdenum materials and components, supporting more than a hundred defense programs including the F-35, the Patriot PAC-3 interceptor and the Trident D5 missile. China holds an estimated 85% of the world's tungsten supply and 40% of Molybdenum, which is the reason the department gives for acting.

What it bought is where this gets interesting.

Not a grant. Not a loan. The DoW committed up to US$450M of Class A Preferred Stock, which it calls a redeemable preferred equity investment: US$200M at the initial closing, and up to 250,000 further shares worth up to US$250M across later tranches.

The preferred accrues a cumulative 5.5% annual dividend paid entirely in kind, by increasing the stated value of the stock rather than by moving cash.

On a liquidation event, on a continuing event of default, or at any time after the tenth anniversary of the initial closing, the holder can require the company to redeem at the liquidation preference.

Read that structure once more, because every clause in it does work.

In plain English: The state put in cash. The company pays no cash back. The state's claim compounds quietly inside the instrument for a decade, and then the state can demand it in full.

Then the equity. Alongside the preferred, the DoW took two warrants: a penny warrant over 5,675,506 shares at an exercise price of US$0.001, and a strike-price warrant over 1,891,835 shares at US$15.92.

Two percentages were published for that one position on the same day, and they are worth putting side by side:

Elmet's Form 8-K states that the two warrants together represent "24.84% of the Company's issued and outstanding Common Stock as of the Initial Closing Date, without giving effect to the issuance of such shares".
The company's press release the same day describes them as "warrants representing up to 19.9% of ELMT's common stock on a post-transaction basis".

Those are not two estimates of the same thing. They are one position counted on either side of the exercise, and the arithmetic closes exactly: 24.84 divided by 124.84 is 19.90.

The first number measures the warrants against the shares that exist now. The second measures them against the shares that would exist once the warrants are exercised.

Which denominator gets published is not a presentational detail, because 20% is roughly where an owner starts attracting the legal consequences of control. The number that puts the state under that line is the one on the press release.

The department also took the exclusive right to appoint one independent director to the board, with a non-voting observer alongside.

And here is where things get interesting. This move intrinsically classifies the deal as shareholding, with a real governance seat and a determined exit.

This is far from a subsidy we were all used to seeing in critical minerals.

The distinction is worth drawing slowly, because the word "investment" has been used loosely in this sector for two years and it has been covering three different things.

A grant transfers money and asks for a deliverable. Once the deliverable arrives, the state's interest ends, and if the company later fails, nothing else happens. A loan transfers money and asks for repayment, which aligns the two parties on the company staying solvent and on almost nothing else. Both instruments sit outside the company looking in.

Equity is different in kind. It puts the state inside the company, with a claim that rises and falls with the enterprise rather than with any particular delivery. A shareholder does better when the company does better, and a company can do better for reasons that have nothing to do with producing more of the material the state was worried about in the first place. Higher prices on flat volumes will do it. So will selling a division. So will a contract with a customer on the other side of the world.

That is not a criticism of the structure. It is merely a description of what the structure rewards, and it is the question every one of this week's announcements has to answer.

Governments have reached for equity before, usually in a crisis and usually in banks or large industries (eg, automotive), where what the state wanted was for the institution to continue existing.

A bank that survives has delivered what the rescue was for. A minerals company that survives has delivered a share price. Whether it delivered Tungsten into an American weapons programme is a separate question that the shareholding does not ask and cannot enforce.

So the test we are going to apply to the rest of this briefing edition is narrow and, we think, the only one that counts. For each government that bought something, what did the instrument oblige anyone to deliver, to whom, and by when?