Investment in critical minerals fell last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on July 16, even after Western nations vowed to boost domestic production for national security reasons.
Furthermore the geographic concentration of supply chains for elements critical to the high-tech, aerospace and clean energy industries has narrowed further, particularly for refining, the IEA said in a report.
The Paris-based agency, which advises energy consuming nations, said that top refining nations China and Indonesia accounted for over three-quarters of total growth in refined supply in the past two years.
Despite the push to diversify supply chains the IEA found that geopolitical tensions and price volatility caused investment in the mining and refining of minerals to fall globally by 9 percent in 2025.
"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," said Tim Gould, the IEA's chief economist.
The IEA pointed in particular to the proliferation of export controls as creating economic and security challenges.
"Rare earth export controls introduced by China in April 2025 forced some automakers to reduce production or temporarily suspend operations," it said in its annual Global Critical Minerals Outlook report.
If Beijing follows through on plans to expand export controls, an estimated $6.5 trillion in annual downstream production outside China could be jeopardised, it said.
The IEA noted areas of improvement, however, such public financing commitments more than quadrupling between 2023 and 2025, reaching $65 billion.
The United States and Malaysia are already reducing China's dominance in refining rare earths, it said.
In rare earth refining, new projects in the United States and production increases in Malaysia reduced the share of the top supplier from over 90 percent in 2023 to 85 percent in 2025, and if planned projects come online as scheduled, it is projected to fall to 70 percent by 2035, it noted.
“Over the past two years, the top refiners — Indonesia for nickel and China for other key energy minerals — accounted for over three‑quarters of total growth in refined supply,” it said.
In several markets, including for manganese, nickel and graphite, virtually all supply growth during this period came from the dominant supplier, it added.
