The nation is to stockpile critical minerals in a new strategic reserve, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said yesterday, as nations scramble to source rare earths and coveted metals outside China.
Mining superpower Australia sits on bulging deposits of lithium, nickel and cobalt — metals used in everything from smartphones to electric vehicles — but most of this boon is sold as raw ore to processing factories in China, which has a choke hold on the global supply of finished critical minerals.
Albanese said Australia would start stockpiling these commodities at home, striking deals to sell them to other “key partners.”
Photo: Bloomberg
“Increasingly uncertain times call for a new approach to make sure Australia maximizes the strategic value of critical minerals,” he said in a statement. “We need to do more with the natural resources the world needs, and that Australia can provide.”
Australia would initially set aside A$1.2 billion (US$765 million) to get the reserve up and running.
Albanese’s government has previously suggested Australia could use its critical minerals as a bargaining chip in tariff talks with the US. Australia sits on some of the largest lithium deposits in the world, and is also a leading source of lesser-known rare earths such as neodymium.
Major manufacturing nations such as the US, Germany and Japan are eager to obtain these critical minerals from sources other than China. Japan has its own critical minerals stockpile, while the US has been investing in metals refineries and other processing technology.
“The ability for the government to stockpile is an important safeguard against market pressure, as well as interventions from other nations,” Albanese said in a speech later yesterday. “It means Australia has the power to sell at the right time to the right partners for the right reasons.”
Critical minerals loom as a likely new front in the unfolding trade war between Washington and Beijing. US President Donald Trump last week ordered a probe that could result in new tariffs targeting China.
Trump’s order stated that the US was dependent on foreign sources of critical minerals, putting its military and energy infrastructure at risk.
China has shown a willingness to hold rare earths to ransom in the past. At the height of a diplomatic dispute in 2010, China effectively banned the export of rare earths to Japan. The move rattled Japan’s auto industry, which was heavily reliant on certain rare earths to build magnets used in motors.
China controls about 90 percent of the world’s supply of rare earths — a subset of critical minerals — and is fiercely protective of its position. Beijing has banned the export of processing technology that could help rival nations and has been accused of using state-imposed quotas to control supply.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
JOINT EFFORTS: MediaTek would partner with Denso to develop custom chips to support the car-part specialist company’s driver-assist systems in an expanding market MediaTek Inc (聯發科), the world’s largest mobile phone chip designer, yesterday said it is working closely with Japan’s Denso Corp to build a custom automotive system-on-chip (SoC) solution tailored for advanced driver-assistance systems and cockpit systems, adding another customer to its new application-specific IC (ASIC) business. This effort merges Denso’s automotive-grade safety expertise and deep vehicle integration with MediaTek’s technologies cultivated through the development of Media- Tek’s Dimensity AX, leveraging efficient, high-performance SoCs and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to offer a scalable, production-ready platform for next-generation driver assistance, the company said in a statement yesterday. “Through this collaboration, we are bringing two
RSS