Photo: EMMET LIVINGSTONE/AFP/Getty Images
The contest for critical minerals is increasingly being won or lost long before a mine enters production. Around the world, ownership of strategically significant mineral deposits is changing hands, and Chinese firms are acquiring an ever-larger share of the assets that will supply future demand for rare earths, lithium, nickel, copper, and other critical minerals. Chinese companies dramatically accelerated their pursuit of overseas mining assets in 2024, driving acquisitions to their highest level in more than a decade. Firms completed 10 mining transactions worth more than $100 million, the most since 2013. The broader trend is even more striking: 2024 was the busiest year for Chinese overseas mining investment and construction in over a decade, underscoring Beijing’s long-term strategy to secure ownership of the mineral resources that will shape future industrial and geopolitical competition.
If China owns the mine, it ultimately influences who gets access to the resource, on what terms, and at what price. Unless the United States and its allies develop a more coordinated approach to monitoring, financing, and protecting strategic mineral deposits, they risk losing control of the next generation of resource development before production even begins.
Tanzania illustrates both the scale of China’s acquisition strategy and the challenges facing the United States and its allies. In 2010, Australia’s Peak Rare Earths discovered the Ngualla deposit, one of the world’s most significant undeveloped rare earth resources. The project was particularly important because it offered the prospect of a fully integrated supply chain outside China, with plans to process the material in the United Kingdom rather than ship it to Chinese refiners.
That vision unraveled in May 2025 when Shenghe Resources, through its subsidiary Ganzhou Chenguang Rare Earths New Material, agreed to acquire Peak Rare Earths for approximately AU$158 million. A last-minute effort to keep the asset under Western ownership emerged when U.S. private equity firm General Innovation Capital Partners submitted a higher, nonbinding offer. The firm counts former Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-WI), one of Washington’s leading China hawks, among its senior advisers. Nevertheless, it was too late, and Shenghe prevailed. Shareholders received nearly four times Peak’s preannouncement share price, and by October the company had been delisted from the Australian Securities Exchange. Control of Ngualla, widely regarded as one of the world’s premier undeveloped rare earth deposits, had passed to a Chinese company.
The transaction highlights a broader reality: Chinese firms are often willing to pay substantial premiums for strategically important mineral assets. In doing so, they are not merely acquiring mines; they are securing future supply and limiting the pool of assets available to competing supply chains. If current ownership and offtake arrangements remain in place, China is on track to receive all rare earth production from Tanzania by 2029, giving Beijing significant influence over one of the world’s most important emerging sources of rare earth elements. Australia does not have an embassy in Tanzania, limiting its capacity for diplomatic intervention.
Not every transaction has ended this way. In Greenland, U.S. officials mounted a sustained effort to keep the Tanbreez rare earth deposit out of Chinese hands, encouraging the developer to reject Chinese bids despite reportedly more lucrative offers. Tanbreez ultimately sold the asset to New York–based Critical Metals Corp., preserving Western control of one of the world’s most strategically significant rare earth projects. Yet the fact that such interventions are often reactive and transaction-specific underscores a broader challenge.
A key constraint is that the United States lacks a comprehensive, real-time registry of critical mineral assets worldwide. As a result, Washington often has limited visibility into which projects are seeking capital, changing ownership, or becoming acquisition targets. In many cases, a potential acquisition only comes to the attention of U.S. embassies or government agencies once negotiations are well advanced or the transaction is nearing completion. By that stage, the prospective Chinese buyer may already have secured exclusivity agreements, conducted due diligence, and arranged financing, leaving little room for Western governments or companies to mount a competing offer.
Visibility is only half the problem; legal authority is the other. The United States and Australia both possess robust domestic screening regimes—the United States’ Committee on Foreign Investment and Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board—that can review and, where necessary, block foreign acquisitions of strategically significant assets at home. But their reach ends at national borders. Neither can prevent a Chinese company from acquiring an Australian-listed firm with assets in Tanzania, a Canadian company operating in Argentina, or a British-backed project in Africa. In these third-country jurisdictions, allied governments have no veto to fall back on. They must instead rely on diplomatic engagement, development finance, export credit support, and coordination with private investors to encourage alternative ownership outcomes. Such measures cannot guarantee that an asset stays in allied hands, but they can sharpen the competitiveness of Western bidders and create viable alternatives to Chinese capital before deals close.
The United States should establish a centralized, comprehensive critical minerals asset registry that tracks major mining, processing, and refining projects globally, including ownership structures, financing needs, development timelines, and potential acquisition risks. Such a system could provide early warning when strategically important assets become available and allow policymakers to identify vulnerabilities before transactions are finalized.
Relying on individual embassies to maintain separate asset lists creates significant opportunities for information gaps and coordination failures. Embassy personnel rotate frequently, making it difficult to preserve institutional knowledge and maintain consistent monitoring of mineral assets over time. Moreover, acquisition efforts are often highly complex and span multiple jurisdictions. The capital provider may be based in the United Kingdom, the company being acquired may be listed in Australia, and the underlying mining asset may be located in Africa or Latin America. A centralized registry would enable the United States and its allies to consolidate intelligence from across these jurisdictions, identify emerging acquisition risks earlier, and coordinate a more rapid and effective response when strategically important assets become targets for acquisition.
Chinese acquisitions are rarely a challenge for the United States alone, and allied countries are already aligning on the need for coordination. In their bilateral framework agreement, Australia and the United States have committed to countering China’s acquisition of strategic mining assets by leveraging investment screening mechanisms, aligning government financing, and coordinating diplomatic engagement in third-country markets. The objective is not only to block Chinese ownership of critical mineral deposits but also to ensure strategically important projects remain within allied supply chains.
The registry and the early action mechanism serve different but complementary functions. The registry is the tool—a shared database of strategically significant assets and their ownership, financing, and development status—while the early action mechanism is the institutional and diplomatic process that acts on what the registry reveals. Pooling intelligence on pending transactions, ownership changes, and financing requirements would sharpen situational awareness and, more importantly, allow allies to convert that awareness into a coordinated response, such as pooled financing from allied sovereign wealth funds or aligned diplomatic pressure.
The mechanism would also help close gaps in diplomatic and commercial coverage that no ally can address alone. Australia, for example, has a relatively limited diplomatic footprint in Africa but a deep presence among the mining companies operating there; the United States has broader embassy coverage but far fewer firms in the field. Neither country alone combines the corporate reach to spot transactions early with the diplomatic reach to act on them. By pooling what each ally observes through its respective networks, the mechanism could translate a more complete picture of emerging acquisitions into faster, better-coordinated intervention before deals are finalized.
Once the registry is established, embassies should systematically track major mining, processing, and refining projects in their host countries, with economic and commercial officers tasked to monitor changes in ownership, financing arrangements, and acquisition activity. This is core frontline commercial diplomacy, yet it is currently done inconsistently—if at all.
Embassies are often the first to observe shifts in local investment activity, engage with government officials, and identify emerging transactions. Yet reporting on strategic mineral assets is frequently ad hoc and dependent on individual officers rather than a formalized process. Establishing standardized reporting requirements, integrating embassy reporting into a centralized asset registry, and providing dedicated training on critical mineral supply chains would improve the U.S. government’s ability to identify acquisition risks early. This would transform embassies from passive observers into an active early-warning network capable of providing policymakers with actionable intelligence before strategic assets change hands.
The United States has built financing tools for mine development. It has not built financing tools for mine acquisition. Even when U.S. officials identify a critical mineral asset at risk of acquisition, there is often no Western investor positioned to move with the speed, certainty, and scale of financing required to compete. Chinese firms frequently benefit from established relationships, patient capital, and state-backed financing, allowing them to act quickly when acquisition opportunities arise. By contrast, Western financing is often fragmented across multiple institutions and can take months to assemble, by which point a transaction may already be effectively complete.
To address this gap, Washington should establish a rapid-response financing mechanism that can quickly mobilize support for strategically significant assets facing acquisition risks. This could involve a coordinated framework linking the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, allied export credit agencies, sovereign wealth funds, development banks, and private investors. The mechanism could provide bridge financing, political risk insurance, debt guarantees, equity coinvestment, or preapproved financing packages that allow allied bidders to compete on compressed timelines.
The objective would not be to intervene in every transaction, but rather to ensure that strategically important assets do not default to Chinese ownership simply because no alternative source of capital can move quickly enough. By creating a standing capability to mobilize financing on short notice, the United States and its allies would be better positioned to preserve access to critical mineral resources and maintain greater influence over the future structure of global supply chains.
The fundamental challenge is that China approaches critical mineral acquisitions through a coordinated ecosystem. Chinese mining companies, state-owned enterprises, policy banks, diplomats, and industrial policymakers operate in support of a common strategic objective: securing long-term control over critical mineral supply. Information about potential acquisitions is gathered, financing is mobilized, diplomatic support is deployed, and transactions are pursued as part of a broader national effort.
By contrast, the U.S. response remains largely reactive. It lacks a comprehensive registry of all strategic mineral assets worldwide, a formal mechanism for monitoring and managing potential acquisitions, and a dedicated financing capability to support alternative bidders. As a result, Washington frequently responds to transactions already underway, while Beijing systematically identifies and pursues opportunities years in advance.
The competition for critical minerals is increasingly a competition for ownership in frontier markets. Unless the United States and its allies build institutions capable of identifying and protecting strategic assets before they change hands, they will find themselves competing for supply chains built on resources they no longer control.
Gracelin Baskaran is the director of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Critical Questions by Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz — February 13, 2026
Critical Questions by Gracelin Baskaran and Kessarin Horvath — October 20, 2025
Critical Questions by Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz — February 26, 2026
