In February 2026, President Trump announced one of the most ambitious industrial security initiatives of his presidency: Project Vault, a $12 billion strategic stockpile of critical minerals and rare earths designed to protect American manufacturers and the defense industrial base from supply disruptions.
This announcement was backed by a $10 billion loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the largest single financing in the agency’s 92-year history, plus roughly $2 billion in private capital from companies like General Motors, Boeing, Google, and Stellantis.
It was a welcome and necessary move. But there’s a problem with Project Vault that almost nobody is talking about: a stockpile of raw rare earth materials that can’t be processed into usable metals and magnets is just an expensive collection of rocks. And right now, the ability to do that processing in North America barely exists.
REalloys (NASDAQ: ALOY) is a company working to change that, and what it’s built may help determine whether Project Vault actually works or becomes the most expensive broken promise in the history of American industrial policy.
To understand why the stockpile might not work, you have to understand the difference between having rare earths and being able to use them.
The $12 Billion Question Nobody Is Asking
Project Vault covers all 60 minerals on the USGS 2025 Critical Minerals List, with initial emphasis on the 15 rare earth elements. The way it works is simple enough, as private companies sign material purchase agreements with the stockpile at a specific inventory price. This creates a reserve that manufacturers can draw from if supply chains are disrupted.
But here’s the question that matters most: what form will those materials be in when they go into the vault?
Rare earths in their raw form, even as separated oxides, are not usable by manufacturers. A defense contractor building missile guidance systems can’t use dysprosium oxide any more than a fabricator can use iron ore. The oxide has to be converted into high-purity metal through a process called metallization, then precision-alloyed to exact specifications, and then fabricated into a finished permanent magnet.
Only then does it become something a manufacturer can actually put into a fighter jet, a drone motor, or a precision-guided munition.
China controls approximately 90% of global rare earth processing and an even larger share of finished magnet production. If the materials going into Project Vault haven’t been processed into usable form, and if there’s no domestic capability to do that processing when the time comes, then the stockpile is just a warehouse full of material that still needs to go through China before anyone can use it.
That defeats the entire purpose.
The Capability America Lost and Can’t Easily Rebuild
The West didn’t lose its rare earth processing capability to espionage or theft. It lost it to economics.
Starting in the 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s, China made a deliberate decision to invest heavily in rare earth mining and processing. State support absorbed losses, environmental controls were minimal, and labor was cheap. The result was a production cost that no Western facility could match. One by one, processing operations across North America and Europe shut down. The last major U.S. rare earth mine, Mountain Pass in California, closed in 2002.
But what disappeared was far more than a few facilities. The people who knew how to run them retired or moved on and the specialized equipment was decommissioned. The institutional knowledge of how to separate 17 individual rare earth elements, how to convert oxides into metals at extreme temperatures and how to alloy those metals to exact specifications for defense and industrial use…all of that accumulated expertise simply ceased to exist in the West.
Converting rare earth oxides into defense-grade metals and alloys involves multi-stage solvent extraction to separate 17 individual elements, metallization at temperatures above 1,200 degrees, and precision alloying across thousands of micro-steps. The Center for Strategic and International Studies identifies this metallization step as the least developed and most difficult capability to rebuild outside China. It’s the kind of expertise that can only be built through years of hands-on operation, and no amount of capital can compress the timeline.
That’s the fundamental challenge Project Vault faces. You can buy the raw material. You can store it. But if you can’t process it into something usable, you haven’t solved the problem. You’ve just moved the bottleneck from the mine to the warehouse.
One Company That Helps Fill the Gap
REalloys has built something that addresses exactly this vulnerability: a proven, operational platform for converting rare earth oxides into defense-grade metals, alloys, and magnets, all within North America and all without any critical reliance on Chinese technology.
The company’s Euclid, Ohio facility has a proven track record of developing heavy rare earth metals, alloys, and magnets for government and commercial partners.
It has worked on several contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and NASA. The expertise behind it spans more than 40 years of applied specialty metals development, including eight years of focused work with U.S. national laboratories and the Defense Logistics Agency.
Midstream, REalloys (NASDAQ: ALOY) holds an exclusive 80% offtake on NdPr, Dy and Tb rare earth production from the Saskatchewan Research Council’s Rare Earth Processing Facility in Saskatoon. That facility, designed and built entirely without Chinese technology, is targeting first commercial production by early 2027. Its AI-driven separation system runs the entire process with six people compared to the roughly 80 a comparable Chinese facility would require, and it produces products with higher yield and greater efficiency.
Upstream, the company has locked in feedstock agreements spanning Saskatchewan, Wyoming, Appalachia, Kazakhstan, Brazil, and Greenland, creating a diversified, non-Chinese raw material network. And downstream, a recently signed a letter of intent for a strategic partnership with South Korean magnet manufacturer JS Link that targets the development of one of the first fully integrated, non-Chinese rare earth magnet supply chains in North America.
In September, REalloys appointed Dr. Muhammad Imran, former CTO of SRC with 17 years of rare earth processing experience, as its Chief Operating Officer. The man who built the processing technology is now running its industrial-scale operations.
Why Project Vault Needs What REalloys Has
Here’s the bottom line for Project Vault: the $12 billion stockpile is only as useful as the processing infrastructure behind it. Without the ability to convert raw materials into finished metals and magnets domestically, the stockpile becomes a strategic reserve that still depends on China to function. And that’s precisely the dependency it was designed to eliminate.
REalloys is the company that appears best positioned to close that loop. The company controls the processing step that CSIS calls the hardest to rebuild…it does it with proven technology that doesn’t touch China’s supply chain…and already delivers to the very agencies that would need to activate the stockpile in a crisis.
And the deadline is closer than most people think. On January 1, 2027, new Pentagon procurement rules take effect that will restrict the use of Chinese-origin rare earth materials in American weapons systems.
REalloys is expected to receive high-purity oxides from SRC for qualification, as early as Q4 2026. The companies that get qualified before the deadline will be locked into defense supply chains for decades.
The U.S. Army has selected REalloys to enter into negotiations to build and operate rare earth processing facilities on the Tooele Army Depot in Utah, the first time the Army has ever placed a commercial mineral-processing facility on an American military base.
And the company’s leadership includes Chairman Stephen S. DuMont, President of GM Defense; General Jack Keane (Ret.), four-star general and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient; and former Secretary of Defense Chief of Staff Joe Kasper, who chairs the advisory board.
Beyond REalloys, several mining giants are also positioned to benefit from Washington’s critical minerals push, including BHP, Freeport-McMoRan, Rio Tinto and Vale, each playing a key role in securing the raw materials underpinning America’s industrial and defense supply chains.
BHP Group (NYSE: BHP) is one of the world's largest mining companies and a major supplier of copper, a metal essential to electrification, defense infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing. BHP produced approximately 2 million tonnes of copper in its 2026 financial year and holds a 45% stake in Arizona's Resolution Copper project, one of North America's largest undeveloped copper resources. As Washington looks to secure domestic supplies of strategically important materials, projects like Resolution could become increasingly significant. However, supplying critical minerals is only one part of the equation. America still needs the processing infrastructure to turn specialized materials into finished industrial products.
Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE: FCX) is particularly important to America's mineral security because much of its copper and molybdenum production is already located on U.S. soil. The company operates major mines across Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, alongside domestic refining and processing facilities. In November 2026, Freeport announced a $4.5 billion expansion of its Bagdad operation in Arizona, designed to substantially increase domestic copper and molybdenum output. Both metals play important roles in industrial manufacturing and defense supply chains, making Freeport a major player in Washington's broader effort to reduce dependence on imported strategic materials.
Rio Tinto (NYSE: RIO) is another mining heavyweight moving deeper into strategically important minerals. Beyond its global copper operations and controlling stake in Arizona's Resolution Copper project, Rio Tinto is developing scandium production capacity in Quebec, Canada. Scandium is a strategically important metal used in high-performance aluminum alloys, including applications relevant to aerospace and defense. The company's investment in North American critical mineral processing illustrates how established mining groups are expanding beyond conventional raw-material extraction into higher-value strategic supply chains.
Vale (NYSE: VALE) brings another important dimension to the critical minerals story through its extensive nickel, copper, and cobalt operations. Its Canadian mining and processing assets provide exposure to metals used in aerospace alloys, industrial equipment, batteries, and advanced technologies. Vale Base Metals reported production of 50,000 tonnes of nickel and 85,000 tonnes of copper in the third quarter of 2026, highlighting the scale of its contribution to global industrial supply chains. With governments increasingly focused on securing reliable supplies of strategic metals, Vale's established North American operations could become even more important.
Yet there is a fundamental distinction between these global mining giants and companies focused specifically on rare earth processing. BHP, Freeport-McMoRan, Rio Tinto, and Vale help provide the raw materials that underpin modern industry. REalloys, meanwhile, is targeting a more specialized vulnerability: turning rare earth materials into the high-performance metals and magnets that America's defense industry needs.
$12 Billion Is Only the Beginning
Project Vault represents the most aggressive U.S. strategic stockpiling initiative since the Korean War. It sends a clear and unmistakable signal that Washington is serious about reducing dependence on China for the materials that power defense systems, electric vehicles, robotics, and advanced manufacturing.
But a signal alone doesn’t solve the problem.
The stockpile needs processing partners that can turn raw materials into something the defense industrial base can actually use. Right now, that capability barely exists in North America.
REalloys (NASDAQ: ALOY) is a company building it, and what happens over the next several months will determine whether America’s $12 billion bet on rare earth security pays off or ends up as the most expensive pile of rocks the government has ever purchased.
By. Michael Scott
