They are barely rare, and the world mines only 390,000 tonnes a year, less than it makes in steel every two hours. Yet without them there are no EV motors, no wind turbines, no smartphones, no guided missiles. And one country controls almost the entire supply chain. 2024 (USGS / IEA) · Compiled June 2026
World mine output 2024
390 kt
smaller than any other metal here
China, mining share
69%
270 kt, more than everyone else combined
United States, #2
45 kt
~12% of world output
Elements in the group
17
15 lanthanides + scandium + yttrium
Where the World's Rare Earths Are Mined (2024)
Colour intensity shows each country's share of global production. Hover a country for its figure.
Lower shareHigher share
2024 Rare-Earth Mine Production by Country (kt REO)
Calling them "rare" is misleading. They are reasonably common in the crust, just hard to separate. The concentration is not geological, it is industrial: China chose to dominate this, decades ago.
Reserves Are Less Concentrated Than Output
China holds the largest reserves, but Brazil, Vietnam, India and Australia all sit on plenty. The problem was never where the ore is. It is who can process it.
Mine Production Trend (kt REO)
Output has climbed sharply as magnet demand took off, but it is still a rounding error next to steel, copper or aluminium.
Tiny Amounts, Hiding in Everything
Rare earths are never the bulk of a product, just a few grams or kilos. But take them out and the thing stops working. Verify-and-cite figures in the footer.
~0.5 g
in a smartphone
Tiny, but in the speakers, vibration motor and screen of every phone.
~2 kg
in an EV motor
Almost every electric car runs on a neodymium magnet.
~1 t
in a wind turbine
A direct-drive offshore turbine holds up to a tonne of rare-earth magnets.
418 kg
in an F-35
Modern defence runs on them: radar, actuators, guidance.
How Small Is 390 kt? (annual world production, Mt)
This is the punchline. The entire world's yearly rare-earth output is 0.39 Mt. The world makes more steel than that every two hours. Their power has nothing to do with volume.
What Rare Earths Are Used For
Nearly half goes into permanent magnets, the strongest known. The rest cleans car exhaust, polishes glass and screens, and colours displays.
It Is Really a Story About a Few Elements
Of the 17, a handful do the heavy lifting. Neodymium and praseodymium make the magnets; cerium and lanthanum do catalysis and polishing.
China's Grip Tightens at Every Step
This is the whole story in one chart. Mining is shareable, and other countries do dig. But the further down the chain you go, from ore to separated oxide to finished magnet, the more total China's control becomes.
China's Share Down the Chain (%)
Mining 69%, refining and separation 91%, finished permanent magnets 94%. The chokepoint is not the mine, it is the chemistry.
Why Processing, Not Mining, Is the Bottleneck
Separating one rare earth from another is genuinely hard. The elements are chemically almost identical, so refining means hundreds of repeated solvent-extraction stages, it is messy, it produces radioactive waste, and margins are thin. The West largely let China take this dirty, unglamorous middle of the chain over thirty years. Now a mine in California or Australia still has to ship its ore to China to be turned into usable metal. Building that processing capacity elsewhere is the real bottleneck, and it is why export controls on rare earths and magnets are now a front line of trade policy.
Magnets, share of demand
~48%
the strongest magnets known
China, magnet production
94%
of the world's sintered magnets
Neodymium demand by 2050
11-13x
as clean tech scales
In an EV vs a phone
~4000x
~2 kg vs ~0.5 g
Why It Matters
Rare earths are the clearest example of a material whose importance has nothing to do with how much we use. A few hundred thousand tonnes a year sits underneath the entire electric and digital economy: the magnets in EV and wind generators, the phosphors in screens, the catalysts in refineries, the guidance systems in defence. Demand for the magnet elements could rise more than tenfold by 2050. And the supply chain is the most concentrated of any major material, with one country holding around 90% of processing and magnet-making. That is why every government with an industrial policy is now trying to build a rare-earth supply chain outside China, and why it will take a decade or more to do it. Mining is the easy part. Learning to separate the elements cleanly, at scale, and at a profit is the hard part the rest of the world skipped.