The Pentagon now owns 15% of America's biggest rare-earth miner

For decades, the federal government's posture toward the rare-earth supply chain was to fund research, publish warnings, and leave the mining and refining to markets.▸ That posture ended on July 10, 2025, when the Department of War — through Title III of the Defense Production Act — bought $400 million of newly issued preferred stock in MP Materials, becoming the company's largest shareholder. It wasn't a one-off. In the twelve months since, the government has signed, extended, or proposed at least three more deals of the same kind, across four different companies, for a combined $2.9 billion in federal capital — some of it spent, some of it merely offered.

MP Materials was the template.▸ Under the Department of War's transaction agreements, the government bought $400 million of Series A Preferred Stock — convertible into 15% of the company's shares — and separately loaned it $150 million to expand heavy-rare-earth separation at Mountain Pass, California. Attached to the equity was a 10-year price floor of $110 per kilogram for MP's NdPr output and a 10-year commitment to buy magnets from a second facility the company is now required to build.

Since then, three more deals have followed the same shape — an equity stake, a subsidized loan, or both, in exchange for a company building out part of the domestic mine-to-magnet chain:

The four deals sit at different stages of completion.▸ MP Materials' is closed and drawn. Vulcan Elements and ReElement Technologies signed for $620 million and $80 million in Office of Strategic Capital loans, plus a $50 million Commerce Department equity stake in Vulcan, in November 2025 — $750 million of government money inside a stated $1.4 billion partnership. Trilogy Metals agreed in October 2025 to sell the government a 10% stake for $35.6 million, tied to an Alaska copper-cobalt project; that deal's closing has since been pushed to July 31, 2026. And the largest number on the board, USA Rare Earth's $1.6 billion, is a non-binding Letter of Intent signed in January 2026 — a proposed $277 million grant and $1.3 billion loan, not yet a contract.

MP Materials' deal is the only one of the four that's both closed and fully drawn, so it's the clearest look at how this kind of financing actually gets spent once the money lands.▸ The two instruments carry different strings.

The $150 million loan is earmarked: it exists to extend Mountain Pass's heavy-rare-earth separation line to include samarium oxide, and nothing else.▸ The $400 million equity purchase carries no comparable restriction in the company's own disclosure — it's ordinary growth capital that happens to have come from a federal agency's balance sheet rather than a bank's or a fund's.

Whatever the eventual scale of these bets, the domestic industry they're meant to build is still tiny.▸ MP Materials — the biggest, most mature recipient — reported 998 full-time-equivalent employees as of December 31, 2025, up from eight contractors when it relaunched Mountain Pass production in 2017. The headcount grew 24% in 2025 alone, including more than 100 new hires at its Fort Worth magnet plant — real growth, but a workforce that would fit inside a single large factory, carrying a $550 million federal bet and a 10-year government offtake commitment.

The strategic case for spending that money at all rests on a single import number.▸ Between 2021 and 2024, 71% of the rare-earth compounds and metals the U.S. imported came from China, per the U.S. Geological Survey's 2026 Mineral Commodity Summaries — and China mined 270,000 of the world's 390,000 metric tons of rare-earth oxide equivalent in 2025, 69% of global production, against 51,000 tons (13%) for the United States. China tightened export licensing on several rare-earth categories twice in 2025, then suspended part of that tightening for a year in November. The equity stakes are a bet that a few hundred million dollars and a few hundred jobs, repeated across a handful of companies, can close a supply gap measured in hundreds of thousands of tons.

Dollar figures for each deal reflect the government's own committed capital as disclosed at signing or closing; matched private capital and non-binding proposals are noted separately in the chart and are not combined with closed totals.