Investment in critical minerals fell in 2025, even after Western nations vowed to boost domestic production for national security reasons. The International Energy Agency said the money dropped anyway, and the supply chains for elements critical to the high-tech, aerospace and clean energy industries narrowed further, especially in refining. The result is a familiar one: governments talk about security, markets lurch, and ordinary workers and consumers get stuck inside the machinery.
The State's Security Fixation
The Paris-based agency, which advises energy consuming nations, said top refining nations China and Indonesia accounted for over three-quarters of total growth in refined supply in the past two years. That concentration sits at the center of the problem the IEA describes, and it’s the kind of bottleneck states keep creating while pretending they’re managing risk. The agency said geopolitical tensions and price volatility pushed global investment in the mining and refining of minerals down by 9% in 2025.
Tim Gould, the IEA's chief economist, said: "Over the last year in particular, concerns about high supply concentration have moved from being a sort of theoretical vulnerability into an immediate economic security challenge." That’s the language of the state system in one sentence: vulnerability becomes security doctrine, and security doctrine becomes a reason to reorganize production around national power.
The IEA pointed to the proliferation of export controls as creating economic and security challenges. It said rare earth export controls introduced by China in April 2025 forced some automakers to reduce production or temporarily suspend operations. The people who actually build the cars don’t get a vote in any of this. They just absorb the shock when states start fencing off materials like they’re hoarding siege supplies.
Who Controls the Bottlenecks
If Beijing follows through on plans to expand export controls, an estimated $6.5 trillion in annual downstream production outside China could be jeopardized, the IEA said in its annual Global Critical Minerals Outlook report. That figure shows how deeply the whole arrangement depends on a few state-backed choke points. One government tightens a valve, and the ripple hits factories far away.
The agency also noted areas of improvement, saying public financing commitments more than quadrupled between 2023 and 2025. Public money, of course, is never neutral. It flows through state priorities, state institutions, and state-defined ideas of resilience, all while the same governments insist they’re reducing dependence and increasing stability.
The IEA said the U.S. and Malaysia are already reducing China's dominance in refining rare earths. That shift may change who sits at the top of the chain, but it doesn’t change the chain itself. The structure remains the same: centralized control, strategic competition, and ordinary people left to live with the consequences when states treat minerals as instruments of power.
The report’s numbers make the pattern plain. Investment fell by 9% in 2025. China and Indonesia accounted for over three-quarters of total growth in refined supply in the past two years. Public financing commitments more than quadrupled between 2023 and 2025. Those are not signs of a system moving toward freedom or even sanity. They’re signs of states and their agencies scrambling to secure their own leverage while the rest of society pays the bill.
The IEA’s warning about export controls lands in the same place as the rest of the report: a world organized around national security produces scarcity, concentration and disruption, then calls the mess a challenge to be managed. The management never ends. The bottlenecks stay. The power stays concentrated. And the people who depend on the supply chains are told to be grateful someone, somewhere, is thinking strategically.