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In its hunt for critical minerals, the Trump administration is increasingly looking abroad to shore up supply chain security for the raw materials underpinning many of the world’s most powerful technologies.

From China to Ukraine to Greenland, key chapters of the Trump administration’s foreign policy in recent months have revolved around critical minerals—a set of 60 or so minerals that the U.S. Geological Survey has deemed essential to U.S. national and economic security. They include rare earths, 17 metallic elements that are not actually that rare but have been at the forefront of Washington’s trade war with Beijing.

In its hunt for critical minerals, the Trump administration is increasingly looking abroad to shore up supply chain security for the raw materials underpinning many of the world’s most powerful technologies.

From China to Ukraine to Greenland, key chapters of the Trump administration’s foreign policy in recent months have revolved around critical minerals—a set of 60 or so minerals that the U.S. Geological Survey has deemed essential to U.S. national and economic security. They include rare earths, 17 metallic elements that are not actually that rare but have been at the forefront of Washington’s trade war with Beijing.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s bid for American artificial intelligence dominance has injected even more urgency into his minerals scramble.

That’s because critical minerals aren’t just the building blocks of clean energy technologies and advanced defense systems; they’re also necessary to power the fleets of data centers and AI infrastructure that the Trump administration is racing to build. Demand for copper in particular is primed to

© Foreign Policy