Obligatory XKCD
https://xkcd.com/3290/
Datacenters face direct hit from China rare earth curbs, as clock runs out on escalated licensing chokeoff
The IEEE is warning that China’s export controls on rare earth minerals could start to impact datacenters, as shipments of some key materials are down 75 percent and Beijing is due to review its policies this November. The techie org's official publication, IEEE Spectrum, focuses on two rare earths in particular, erbium and …
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Sunday 30th August 2026 22:13 GMT retiredFool
Re: Canada has rare minerals
Problem is donnie's been an ass to lulu too. What if Brazil gives the US the finger too? I mean what is an agreement these days but toilet paper. Donnie's even ripped up his own agreements with Canada and Mex. Donnie may well get what he wants, all products will be mined, and manufactured in the US. Because no one else will sell them to us. And needless to say, the selection of products in that scenario will be much less broad than it is today. Much.
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Friday 28th August 2026 23:08 GMT cyberdemon
Re: Losing AI datacentres.
True, but it's going to affect ALL made-outside-China electronics, not just datacentre parts. Power electronics in particular i.e. EVs and their chargers, inverters for batteries, solar, wind, aircon etc etc.
PC motherboards and power supplies, consumer GPUs, and probably DRAM too will all go up in cost.
And if you thought the advent of Solid-State Transformers for electric substations was going to mitigate the shortages of copper and "grain-oriented electrical steel" that have been pushing supergrid transformer lead-times towards the decade mark and hampering the UK's grid upgrades (thanks, fucking AI), well now you may have to think again.
Even lightbulbs these days are full of chip-capacitors, to stop the LEDs flickering on the AC mains.
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Sunday 30th August 2026 20:58 GMT VoiceOfTruth
Re: Wouldn't it be just a whole lot easier…
>> if you didn't have an absolute gobshite for President.
It's not just Trump. It's the whole 'American way'. Everything is a war. War on booze, war on drugs, war on this, war on that. For all the bullshit the American 'Christian' right goes on about, they never have an urge for peace.
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Sunday 30th August 2026 08:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
These rare earth mineral issues should be of concern to all of us.
It's an existential threat to America. If they even look like they are going to lose the ability to build missiles then they'll start a war with what they have. Likewise if America cuts off China from oil it will start a war.
If America wasn't such a greedy capitalist pig it would make deals with Denmark over Greenland and Canada rather than the stupidity we see now from the orange clown. Then it could spend money on it's own processing facilities and not have to rely on China but that's too obvious. It would rather try and get them for free. I'm still trying to work out what they thought would happen with Iran, that was never going to work and they are completely out of options.
If you move most of the worlds manufacturing to China as we have done because it's cheap labour and cheaper products then the outcome of that was always going to be that they secure the materials they need to do it hence all their partnerships in Africa. There is literally nothing anyone can do about it other than source materials elsewhere or trade with China by being on good terms with them.
There's always recycling but that costs money they don't want to spend.
It'll be interesting to see the outcome of all this but it may not end in a good way. Do we really need all these data centres anyway?
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Sunday 30th August 2026 09:33 GMT rgjnk
All part of the plan
Long term readers of El Reg might remember the stories warning many years ago of China seeking to dominate the rare earths market by undercutting other producers to force them out.
What you're seeing now is the end game of that plan.
It's far from being the only product where complacency and useful idiots have allowed the same to happen.
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Tuesday 1st September 2026 13:00 GMT Paul Crawford
Re: How About Not Building Dependencies on Rare Materials in the First Place?
The materials are invaluable for certain products so you can't simply not use them and still get XYZ performance.
The dependency issue is the supply chain, specifically the processing ("rare" earths are not so rare, but as one El Reg writer once put it, the difference between ore and dirt is the economics of extraction), and that is what China has invested in (and out-priced others, and ignored environmental issues) to achieve dominance. Not putting our collective balls in the global capitalist vice is the answer, but nobody is going to do that when sweet, sweet profits are at stake.
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Tuesday 1st September 2026 14:18 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: How About Not Building Dependencies on Rare Materials in the First Place?
The materials are invaluable for certain products so you can't simply not use them and still get XYZ performance.
Yep. Might become tricky to watch an XYZ performance on YT given most fixed-line telecoms runs on dope. So EDFAs (Erbium Doped Fibre Amplifiers) pumping beats down erbium doped fibres.
The dependency issue is the supply chain, specifically the processing ("rare" earths are not so rare, but as one El Reg writer once put it, the difference between ore and dirt is the economics of extraction),
Yep, but Merkins can break out their heavy weapons because it's xenotime! Which is a great name for a mineral that contains yttrium, erbium and other useful lanthanides. Also exists in places like Colorado, but the US didn't bother mining & refining because they could just buy from China. Until they couldn't.
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Wednesday 2nd September 2026 08:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: How About Not Building Dependencies on Rare Materials in the First Place?
@ Paul Crawford:
"The materials are invaluable for certain products so you can't simply not use them and still get XYZ performance."
You do not know that. The researchers stopped researching once they found a method of achieving performance XYZ, using Material A.
It makes sense to do things that way if, and only if, Material A is cheap enough, and if the existance of multiple, independent sources of Material A is not a concern.
It should have been a national-security-type concern, but was not, and now the piper must be paid.
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Monday 31st August 2026 11:17 GMT Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck
It must really suck to be an American under Der Pumpkin Fuhrer. Everybody is his enemy except the very worst members of society; he just flippin' loves them!
So the orange boy-child has temper-tantrumed against the EU, Canada, Australia, Greenland, New Zealand, Germany, France, and virtually every other democratic nation in the world while he sucks up to the likes of Putinski and those yahoos in North Korea and Israel with their brutality.
Now the Americans are surprised that the temper tantrums are coming back to bite them in the arse with reverse tariffs and embargoes? That is rich - and so very typical of the MAGAt morons!
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Wednesday 2nd September 2026 08:40 GMT mdentari
Here in the USA we have rare earth minerals in abundance it's just that China with it's pennies an hour workforce can mine it much cheaper than the USA. China took over in the early 2000's. Brazil, Vietnam and Brazil have it to but less infrastructure to mine it. We are not running out anytime soon. Also recycling electronics can extract those minerals to.
