In January 2026, a crew from Grist hiked to a hilltop near the town of Hpare in northern Myanmar. Below them, the jungle was gone. Pits the size of pools lined the slope, filled with acid. Plastic pipes ran toward a river. Workers moved between the holes with no masks, no gloves — mining rare earths. We've written before about the price gap between Chinese and Western dysprosium, but this is the first time we've traced where the cheaper side of that gap actually starts.

Myanmar has been falling apart since the army coup in 2021. The economy crashed. Armed groups took over whole regions. The junta forced young men into service in 2024, and thousands ran for the borders. Many ended up in Kachin State, right next to China, where ethnic armies run the land and the mines.

The pay is low. The work is toxic. The chemicals burn skin and foul rivers for miles. But for men with no other options, it is work.

That is where China's rare earth supply chain starts. Photos from space show hundreds of mining sites across Kachin, most of them near the border town of Pangwa. A rebel boss set up the first ones. By 2017, the flow had hit large scale, and by 2022 Myanmar was one of the biggest sources of heavy rare earths going into China's refineries. Workers paid brokers as little as 2,000 yuan — about $290 — just to get the job.

The rare earths pulled from those pits do not stay in Myanmar. They cross into China, get refined, turned into metals, pressed into magnets, and shipped to plants in Japan, Germany, and the U.S. Those magnets end up in EV motors, phone speakers, wind turbines, and missile systems. By the time the supply chain hits a showroom or a factory floor, it looks clean. The source is not.

In July 2026, Thai protesters stood outside China's embassy in Bangkok, blaming mining runoff from Myanmar for fouling the Mekong and three other rivers. Rare earths have no tracing rules the way cobalt and tin do. No audits, no red flags at customs. A kilo of dysprosium refined in Jiangxi looks the same whether the ore came from a real mine or a war zone.

That gap matters now more than ever. Terbium is up 103% this year. Dysprosium is up 105%. Prices keep rising and supply keeps tightening, but nobody is tracking where the ore comes from.

The West is trying to fix this. Washington banned exports of battery scrap this month. Germany just licensed a new rare earth site. Australia is preparing to break ground on the Nolans rare earth project.

Real money is going in. But none of it fixes the tracing problem. There is no audit trail. Nobody checks. Until someone builds a way to prove where the ore came from, every new plant sits one contract away from the same pits in Kachin.

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Washington issued a new rule: sellers of battery black mass and tungsten scrap must allocate 100% of their monthly sales to U.S. buyers, starting August 27. It marks the first time the Defense Production Act has been used to block exports of recycled metals. The timing matters — by January 2027, defense firms must stop buying tungsten from China, but U.S. recycling plants will need two to four years to double.

Hades Resources, a Munich startup, won the rights to explore the Storkwitz rare earth deposit in Saxony — the only known rare earth site in Germany. A JORC-compliant resource estimate from 2013 classified about 20,100 tonnes of contained rare earth oxides, though Hades plans to update those numbers with modern tools. Hades plans to use a laser drill it calls Cerberus and test a way to dissolve the minerals underground. Europe has zero active rare earth mines. The startup has raised about €20 million since 2025 and aims to deliver a fresh resource estimate.

Jack Lifton, co-chair of the Critical Minerals Institute, laid out how America's rare earth stockpile should work. His view: a government that just buys metals and stacks them will drive up prices without adding a unit of new supply. But a reserve that buys when prices are low, sets strict specs, and feeds real stock to real factories can reshape a whole market. Lifton calls the current talk in Washington "the Hollywood version of reality" — spend money, beat the villain, roll credits. Real supply chains don't work that way.

This is the last time I'll write you about this.

On August 18th, Washington hands one energy source a competitive edge it has never given anything. Not oil. Not solar. Not wind. Not nuclear.

An edge that runs through 2033.

Everything else is already in place.

The discovery came first. An energy source 140 times global electricity demand, confirmed near the Grand Canyon.

Then the breakthrough. 3 miles of solid rock, drilled in 16 days instead of 64.

Then the validation. Google's 15-year contract. Gates' $100 million. The Pentagon's priority one designation.

And now the desperation. America's largest grid just failed to secure enough power for the third year running. Costs are up more than 60%, and the failures have already cost ratepayers nearly $30 billion. That's the running price of waiting, and it comes out of your pocket whether you act or not.

August 18th is the last piece. After that, the story writes itself, and the crowd shows up.

One company sits at the center. 60 years of work. A window that slams shut on August 18th.

After the 18th, you're reading about it. Before the 18th, you're ahead of it.

This is the final call >>

Jack Lifton, Co-Chair, Critical Minerals Institute — InvestorIntel
August 5 2026

Terbium trades at $4,028.50 per kilo — up 103% this year and more than 500% since January 2020. It costs four to five times more than dysprosium. The reason is scarcity: terbium comes almost all from clay deposits in southern China and Myanmar, with no big source anywhere else. When an EV motor or wind turbine runs above 100°C, normal neodymium magnets weaken. A small dose of terbium stops that, which is why defense chiefs and carmakers treat it as a national security issue.

The index sat at 264.6 on August 5, down from its February peak above 290 but still elevated by historical standards. Light rare earths held flat, but the heavy end — dysprosium, terbium, holmium — stayed near record highs. Supply is so tight outside China that buyers cannot always find usable stock at any price. Most deals happen through private contracts where purity, tracing, and export rules shape the real cost as much as the listed price. The index has not dropped below 250 in months.

— Rare Earth Exchanges

CSIS analyst Gracelin Baskaran told Mining.com that China's export bans sped up the very thing Beijing feared — a global push to break its grip. A February meeting led by Marco Rubio brought 55 countries together, the largest State Department meeting ever held on rare earths. Rare Earth Exchanges agrees with the long-term thesis but warns a weak spot remains if China tightens controls again before September, when trade talks resume.

— Mining.com / Rare Earth Exchanges

The company grouped five properties into a new Foothills Rare Earths District, growing its Georgia land to 18.5 times the Shiloh footprint. Surface samples at Shiloh ran as high as 44.5% total rare earth oxides, and drilling at Liberty Peak found rare-earth-rich sands 50 km away. The targets are dysprosium and terbium, two heavy rare earths that still come almost all from China. An American source at that grade would change the picture — REA plans to spend $15 million on the district this year.

— Rare Earth Exchanges / Mining.com

U.S. defense firms are moving faster than European rivals to lock up rare earth supply, per Reuters. A source at a big German arms maker said American buyers found and bought the stock so fast that only scraps were left at steep prices. The Pentagon has a ten-year deal to buy from MP Materials with a $110/kg price floor for NdPr and a magnet offtake agreement. Europe has nothing like it, and that gap is now showing up deal by deal.

— Mining.com / Reuters