December 1951. Lacq, France.

A team of geologists working for the French national petroleum company struck something more than three kilometers under the Béarn hills. Natural gas — high pressure, high temperature, dangerously rich in hydrogen sulfide. Most companies would have walked away. France built a new kind of steel mill to handle the corrosive gas and turned a farming village of a few hundred people into what the French press called le Texas français — the French Texas.

By the 1970s, the Lacq field was supplying one-third of France's natural gas. By 2013, it was dry.

The town did not become a museum. It became chemicals. Sulfur. Carbon fiber. The 8,000 jobs that came with the gas stayed in Lacq long after the wells ran out.

Today an American company announced that Lacq is going to be a rare earth hub.

USA Rare Earth said from Paris this morning that it will invest another €175 million in France through 2030, building on its January announcement of a 3,750-ton-per-year rare earth metal and alloy plant in Lacq. The new facility sits next to Carester's Caremag separation plant, where Japan's JOGMEC, Iwatani, and the French government already committed €216 million in 2025. Together, Carester's separation and USA Rare Earth's metals would form the first integrated rare earth refining and magnet-feedstock complex anywhere in the West.

USA Rare Earth holds a 12.5% stake in Carester as of April. It owns Less Common Metals, the British alloy maker. It builds magnets in Stillwater, Oklahoma. It is also being sued in Texas state court by MP Materials for allegedly stealing magnet IP — a lawsuit filed ten days ago. The same CEO who is now in Paris, Barbara Humpton, has not addressed the suit publicly.

The French side has its own incentives. The C3IV industrial program covers up to 45% of equipment costs. The French government is considering debt guarantees and possibly a direct equity stake in USAR's European subsidiary. France is rebuilding the same rare earth refining capability the Solvay plant at La Rochelle began winding down in the 2000s.

The arc is symmetric. Lacq powered 1970s France with gas, and the Americans bought what spilled over. In 2026 Lacq will refine rare earths, and the Americans will buy what spills over. The town changes its fuel. The industrial logic stays.

The lawsuit will be settled in Texas. The supply chain keeps moving.

Rare Earths Americas (NYSE: REA) closed its debut session on Friday with a notable surge, pulling investor attention to its US heavy rare earth discovery. The company is a pure-play US-focused heavy rare earth developer — the segment of the supply chain where Western capacity is thinnest. China refines roughly 95% of global heavy rare earths. REA's pitch: an undeveloped US deposit, fast-tracked through permitting under the new federal critical minerals framework. The NYSE listing makes REA one of a small handful of public US-only heavy rare earth pure-plays, alongside USA Rare Earth and Defense Metals. The stock's first-session move reflects the same investor appetite that pushed USAR's market cap above $6 billion earlier this year.

The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology ran the world's first sustained deep-sea rare earth trial earlier this year off Minamitorishima, an uninhabited island 1,900 kilometers southeast of Tokyo. The operation pulled rare earth-rich seabed mud from approximately 6,000 meters below the sea surface. If the trial is judged successful, Japan plans a scaled demonstration in February 2027 at 350 metric tons per day. The technology is unproven at scale. The geopolitics is clear: Japan has been working since the 2010 China embargo to diversify rare earth supply away from Beijing — at any cost, including from the floor of the Pacific.

Rare Earth Exchanges' weekly Structural Market Tracker for the week ending May 30 came back with the same verdict its analysts have run with for months. Despite the May 14–15 Trump-Xi summit and ongoing trade dialogue, no meaningful improvement emerged in Western access to rare earths, heavy rare earths, or permanent magnets. China continues tightening governance over critical minerals while preserving maximum strategic position. Western progress remains incremental — Viridis advancing permits in Brazil, Arafura clearing financing milestones, US-allied policymakers debating stockpiles and incentives. REEx also notes the Myanmar conflict poses a growing risk to heavy rare earth feedstock supply.

Michel Van Hoey, Senior Partner at McKinsey, in Bloomberg
May 2026

SAMARIUM

Samarium is what holds the heat. Neodymium-iron-boron magnets lose their pull above about 200°C. Samarium-cobalt magnets work past 350°C. That is why every precision-guided munition, every fighter aircraft actuator, and every space-qualified motor since the 1970s has used SmCo. The first SmCo magnets came out of US Air Force-funded labs in 1966. China refines roughly 90% of global samarium today. Lynas became the first non-Chinese commercial producer of separated samarium in March of this year, from its Malaysia processing facility. The US Defense Logistics Agency's contract with REalloys-Terves is scaling US samarium and gadolinium metal production to 300 tons per year.

Atlas Critical Minerals — a 30.1%-owned subsidiary of Atlas Lithium — reported surface sampling at its Alto Paranaíba project in Minas Gerais with grades up to 28,870 ppm TREO. One sample also returned 23.2% TiO₂, and graphite concentrate purity reached 96.6%. The company holds rights to more than 575,000 acres in Brazil, a country with the world's second-largest graphite reserves and one of the most under-explored rare earth provinces.

— Atlas Lithium

Australia's iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest is weighing whether to sell his stake in the Yangibana rare earth project. The asset is among Australia's larger undeveloped neodymium-praseodymium deposits. Hastings, the project operator, signed a supply MOU with Ucore in late 2025 and another with Wyloo in October 2025. The Forrest move cuts the other way — even Australia's biggest mining personalities are uncertain whether current rare earth pricing rewards new mine development.

— Mining.com

The G7 trade ministers issued a joint statement in early May committing to "ensure that attempts or threats to weaponize economic dependencies will fail." It is the strongest G7 language yet on critical minerals — a direct response to China's expanding export licensing regime. The ministers also pledged coordinated action through a permanent secretariat, possibly housed at the IEA or OECD. Translation: the Western bloc is firming up.

— G7 Trade Ministers joint statement

The US Geological Survey's 2026 outlook projects domestic rare earth supply to rise 35% as new American projects come online. The base is small — the US still produces less than 1% of global NdFeB magnet output — but the trajectory marks the first significant US capacity additions in a generation. MP Materials at Mountain Pass, USA Rare Earth at Stillwater, and Round Top in Texas are the main contributors. Ramping is the easy story to write. Holding the ramp is harder.

— US Geological Survey