Sometime during the COVID lockdowns of 2020, a PhD student in Ontario pulled apart an old laptop he'd bought years earlier. He cracked open the hard drive and found a tiny rare earth magnet inside. That got him asking a question most people never think about: what happens to these magnets when we throw the machine away?

The answer, usually, is nothing. They go to landfills. Or they get shipped overseas as scrap. The rare earths inside them — neodymium, dysprosium, terbium — are never recovered.

That PhD student was Ahmad Ghahreman. His doctoral work focused on chemical extraction of metals. And that discarded laptop became the first test case for a process he now calls MagCycle.

Last Tuesday, Ghahreman stood inside a 144,000-square-foot plant in Mesa, Arizona, and cut the ribbon on Cyclic Materials' first commercial-scale rare earth magnet recycling facility in the United States. The plant can process up to 25,000 metric tonnes of magnet-bearing scrap per year — old hard drives, electric motors, medical devices, robotics parts, anything with a permanent magnet inside. More than 7,000 tonnes of scrap had already been delivered before the doors officially opened.

The ceremony drew William Kimmitt, the Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, along with Mesa's mayor and Arizona state officials. That kind of federal attention tells you this is not just a recycling story. It's a supply chain story. Cyclic Materials, Ghahreman's company, signed a deal in July with ERI, the largest electronics recycler in the U.S., to feed the Mesa plant with magnet-bearing e-waste from across the country. That gives the plant something most rare earth projects don't have on day one: feedstock.

The timing matters. China's export control pause expires on November 10. No dysprosium oxide or terbium oxide has been shipped from China to Japan this entire year. Beijing put both MP Materials and USA Rare Earth on its export blacklist in June. So every tonne of rare earth material recovered from American scrap is a tonne that doesn't need to come from China.

Cyclic Materials invested more than $20 million in the Mesa facility and plans to open a second plant in Chesterfield County, South Carolina by 2028. Recycling alone won't solve the problem. Even at full capacity, Mesa's output is a fraction of what the U.S. needs.

But it's real production, running today, in American hands. That's more than most projects on the drawing board can say.

So here's a number that got my attention.

Venture capital investment in U.S. crypto companies hit $7.9 billion last year.

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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Putin and Trump discussed a trilateral meeting with Xi Jinping at the APEC summit in Shenzhen, November 18–19. Peskov told reporters the idea had been raised before and that "there will be such an opportunity." Russia has said Putin will attend. The White House has not confirmed whether Trump will go. The APEC summit falls eight days after China's November 10 export control deadline. If the controls resume, three of the world's largest mineral powers will be in the same room with the consequences already visible.

Australian Rare Earths (ASX: AR3) reported that its Koppamurra pilot plant at ANSTO's Sydney facility has produced its first mixed rare earth hydroxide. The plant processed eight tonnes of ore and generated about 5,000 litres of leach solution at target recovery rates. CEO Travis Beinke called it "another important de-risking milestone." Koppamurra holds both light and heavy rare earths, and the Australian government backed it with a $5 million grant.

Mihir Torsekar, senior economist at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, published an op-ed this weekend about Project Vault. That's the Trump administration's strategic critical minerals reserve, backed by a $10 billion Export-Import Bank loan and nearly $2 billion in private capital. Torsekar says it has a blind spot: the programs funding the reserve don't bar purchases from Chinese-controlled refineries. His fix — buy only from American and allied processors, turning Project Vault into a guaranteed customer for domestic refining.

Everyone is talking about Trump's new tech law.

Financial Times says this tech puts America "on the verge of a financial revolution."

Yahoo Finance says it could unlock $400 trillion.

Jeff Brown was consulted by Congressional offices in Washington, D.C. to advise on it.

He says the real number is even bigger — as much as $2.6 quadrillion could pour onto a new type of investment exchange in the days ahead…

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Greenland Mines (Nasdaq: GRML) announced it has achieved full Nasdaq compliance after completing its Sarfartoq rare earth acquisition with Greenland government approval. The company is spinning off its biotech division in Q4 2026 to focus on critical minerals. Sarfartoq holds a NdPr-rich deposit with a pre-tax NPV of $2.05 billion in the high case.

— GlobeNewswire

REalloys Chief Growth Officer Anupam Ghildyal told reporters that recycled magnets have the potential to cover more than 20% of U.S. rare earth feedstock needs over the next five to ten years. He added that domestic recycling alone won't end the dependence on China but called it "an increasingly important part" of supply security.

— Daily Caller News Foundation

Rare earth refiners, recyclers, and magnet makers outside China face growing uncertainty over access to Chinese technology, equipment, and feedstock when the export control pause expires November 10, Fastmarkets reported. China's controls cover not just raw materials but processing know-how and equipment — which means even Western recyclers may lose access to tools they need.

— Fastmarkets

Executives from American Resources' ReElement and Electrified Materials units are attending five industry events through September 30. The stops include Purdue University, an Indianapolis trade conference, the UBS Global Materials Conference in New York, Argonne National Laboratory, and the Adamas rare earth summit in Toronto. Topics range from battery recycling to rare earth magnets.

— InvestorNews