Behind China's 660% surge in rare earth exports, US military inventory is in crisis!

Can a finger-thick piece of carbon fiber pull two airplanes? That's nothing compared to rare earths.

Chinese Customs dropped a bombshell: June exports of rare earth magnets to the US soared to 353 tons, a 660% increase from May! American factories should have been celebrating with firecrackers, but giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin were stamping their feet in frustration. China's "first cut off supply, then open up" strategy, while seemingly offering relief, actually squeezes the lifeblood of the US military industry.

Can't the F-35 fly due to a shortage of magnets? The US military arsenal has only three months' supply left.

Pentagon generals sweat as they stare at inventory tables. Each F-35 consumes 417 kilograms of rare earths, and the Virginia-class nuclear submarine is a "rare earth black hole," consuming at least 4 tons per ship. In April, China suddenly halted exports of medium and heavy rare earths for military use, leaving Lockheed Martin workshops piled with unfinished fighter jets and the assembly lines completely shut down. Raytheon is in even worse shape. With supplies of neodymium iron boron magnets for its Javelin anti-tank missiles cut short, the Pentagon rummaged through its Cold War reserves, finding only enough to last 90 days.

It's not like the US hasn't tried to save itself before. Trump gave $400 million to MP Materials, a domestic rare earth manufacturer, only to stumble upon a joke: half of the ore mined at its California mines had to be shipped to China for processing! The yield rate for its own magnets was less than 60%, and the cost was 2.3 times higher than Chinese products. Even worse, smuggling routes were blocked—a special meeting in Guangxi explicitly declared "zero tolerance." Want medium and heavy rare earths to slip into US military factories? No way.

Tesla is paying an extra $2,200 per vehicle, forcing Apple to ditch its vibration motor.

The civilian market is also in turmoil. On the assembly line at Tesla's Berlin factory, workers holding Chinese permanent magnets shook their heads, saying, "Switching to this stuff will increase the cost of each vehicle by $2,200." Apple engineers were even more frustrated—the iPhone 17's vibration motor's performance was compromised due to a lack of neodymium magnets, delaying the new phone's release by three months. Boeing's 787 production line was completely halted, sending its stock price plummeting 12% in a single day. Wall Street tycoons railed, "Without China's rare earths, the US can't even make a decent phone!"

Ironically, the US Department of Commerce quietly backed down. In exchange for rare earth supplies, 11 Chinese semiconductor companies were quietly removed from the Entity List.

The Wall Street Journal sarcastically commented, "This isn't a negotiation; it's a strategic surrender!"

China's 99.999% purity crushes the US, turning deep-sea mining into a political spectacle.

China's boldness in playing the rare earth card relies on a technological generation gap. In mines in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, the purity of dysprosium oxide purified in extraction tanks has reached 99.9999%, two zeros higher than the data obtained in US laboratories. Even a Texas factory, desperate to replicate the technology, can't—there are only 23 rare earth separation engineers left in the US, with an average age of 52. Meanwhile, China's Baotou Research Institute graduates 5,000 professionals in a single year.

Trump signed an executive order to develop deep-sea rare earth mines, but scientists refuted the issue: Undersea mining costs are five times higher than onshore, and radioactive waste could fill three football fields! The EU is investing €1 billion in alternative supply chains, aiming for a maximum self-sufficiency rate of 20% by 2030. Japan has stockpiled rare earths for 50 years, yet 90% of its magnetic material orders still go to China.

Humanoid robots are igniting a new battlefield, with China poised for a 300% increase in demand.

The real killer feature lies in the future. Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot is about to enter mass production, with each unit consuming 5 kilograms of neodymium iron boron. Global rare earth demand is expected to surge 300% by 2026, and Chinese companies have already secured 90% of magnetic material orders. The US Senate pushed through the Critical Minerals Act, requiring a 30% reduction in US dependence on China by 2027. Tesla and General Motors jointly opposed this move, stating, "If this were to happen, the electric vehicle industry would collapse!"

China counterattacked with two more trump cards: 21 companies in the Zhongke Sanhuan Belt rushed to register new permanent magnet patents, specifically targeting Hitachi Metals' barriers, which expired in 2026; and the National Rare Earth Standardization Committee issued a "Carbon Footprint Accounting Method," forcing European and American companies to comply with Chinese environmental standards. This combination of "technology + regulations" completely scuttled the US rare earth alliance plan.

The outcome of the rare earth war was already written into China's customs data—total exports in June reached a 16-year high of 7,742 tons, but the military heavy rare earths remained locked. While White House negotiators were nibbling at a deal to stockpile supplies, Chinese engineers were upgrading their grain boundary diffusion technology in the laboratory, slashing dysprosium usage by half while increasing performance by 20%.

While Trump boasted about reopening 70-year-old rare earth mines, automated smelters in Xinjiang are increasing the efficiency of converting ore into magnetic materials by 40%. The winner of this industrial vitamin war has never been the location of the mine, but rather who holds the "molecular scalpel" for purification.