The Gulf’s Play for Critical Minerals

As critical minerals become a core national security concern, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar are moving capital into the sector in ways that go well beyond traditional investment.

I remember staring at the wall-sized periodic table in 11^th grade chemistry and deciding, pretty definitively, that I was not destined for the sciences. I gravitated toward liberal arts – writing, politics, history – convinced that I’d never hear the words tantalum and gallium again.

Which is why it still makes me laugh that when I joined the U.S. government, my very first overseas trip was to Mining Indaba, the largest mining and minerals conference in the world. Every year, thousands of people from dozens of countries descend on Cape Town, South Africa, from CEOs and investors to heads of state and senior ministers, to discuss the elements that had just seemed like a jumble of symbols back in chemistry class.

That trip, in retrospect, was an early signal of what’s now unmistakable. Critical minerals are not only the stuff of chemists and engineers. They are the raw materials needed to manufacture a wide range of strategic technologies – from semiconductors to AI chips to missile systems and more – that have become essential national security assets. What may have once felt like an obscure corner of industrial policy is now one of the world’s most contested geopolitical domains. Over decades, China has built a near monopoly across the mining, processing, and refining of critical minerals, creating a major vulnerability for countries, including the U.S., who have centered their leadership roles and economic futures around technology.

Since President Trump took office last year, securing access to critical minerals has become a more visible pillar of U.S. foreign policy, which has been hard to miss if you’ve been tuning into Oval Office meetings. In meeting after meeting, critical minerals and supply chains are a centerpiece of the conversation. And last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened leaders from more than 50 countries for a critical minerals ministerial meeting meant to showcase the Administration’s strategy and tools to support minerals projects and aligned supply chains.

The White House’s recent preoccupation with Greenland is also a visible manifestation of the supply chain focus if conceived not as conquest of territory belonging to a NATO ally or an abstract race to counter Russia and China in the Arctic, but rather as a form of “supply chain annexation” focused on the country’s massive deposits of rare earth elements. But most of America’s international supply-chain moves are not hostile. They look like joint ventures, investment partnerships, and quiet coordination between allies who’ve all come to the same conclusion: the race for AI, energy, and defense will be won or lost not only in technological innovation, but in control of the raw materials that make those technologies possible. Taken together, the United States is embracing a much more assertive vision of economic statecraft, one that views control over supply chains as a prerequisite for technological leadership in the 21st century.

There is precedent for this approach. Long before critical minerals became a top geopolitical issue in Washington, Japan and South Korea treated access to key materials as a strategic imperative. As two of the largest export-driven industrial economies with almost no domestic energy or critical minerals supplies, for decades, both countries built institutions to invest in energy and minerals overseas to secure the energy and minerals their industries depended on. What’s new today is not the model itself, but the scale at which it is now being deployed.

That’s where the Middle East comes in.

For decades, the region’s strategic relevance to Washington was defined almost entirely by energy. Today, hydrocarbon powerhouses Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar are positioning themselves as partners in a different kind of security projectn – financing, processing, and aligning supply chains important to the United States. Some of these moves are highly visible; others take the form of quieter (yet massive) capital deployment. And within the GCC, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha are pursuing different strategies as they compete with each other for economic and political leadership. Yet together, they signal a region poised to play an outsized role in the critical minerals race, mirroring the prominence it is already assuming in the race for AI supremacy.

For years, Gulf sovereign wealth funds largely approached the mining sector as investors. They invested in large, publicly-listed mining companies, which was useful for portfolio diversification and reliable returns, but they were minority shareholders and couldn’t shape assets or supply chains. The UAE, Saudis, and Qataris have all done this, and they continue to do so.

What’s different now is that this approach no longer tells the whole story. Alongside minority-stake investments, Gulf capital is moving upstream into operating assets, consortium-backed platforms, and corridor-linked projects that connect mines to processing, logistics, and offtake. The shift in resources reflects a more strategic and longer-term view of the mining opportunity, where projects can take years to get off the ground and even longer to reshape supply chains. Gulf countries are not doing this in the same way. Saudi Arabia is building toward industrial capacity and scale, while the UAE and Qatar are building financial leverage. But the intent is clear: the Gulf is prepared to deploy patient capital and use its financial leverage to have an oversized impact in this sector and the geopolitics surrounding it.

Saudi Arabia: Building an Industrial Minerals Hub

Saudi Arabia is making a big bet that it can become a global mineral industrial hub and anchor entirely new supply chains that will both feed the Kingdom’s domestic growth and geopolitical ambitions. The best place to start with Saudi ambitions in critical minerals is, like many other economic moves, Vision 2030, Mohammed Bin Salman’s strategy for economic transformation in the kingdom. Vision 2030 elevated minerals and mining as a pillar and Saudi’s ubiquitous sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), used state-owned company, Maaden, to develop Saudi’s domestic mineral resources and invest in mines overseas to secure long-term supply of inputs for Saudi Arabia’s economic growth and diversification plans. The Saudis estimate that they have $2.5 trillion in mineral resources, including gold, zinc, copper, phosphate and lithium, as well as rare earth elements – the latter which seems to have the most ambitious agenda, especially vis-à-vis the United States.

When China imposed new export controls on rare earths in late 2025, America’s dependence on China for its own technological future became front-page news. The vulnerability was suddenly impossible to ignore. China dominates the supply of more than a dozen critical minerals essential to high-powered magnets, batteries, semiconductors, lasers, optical systems, and beyond. Most troubling of all, however, is that China controls more than 90 percent of global processing and refining capacity for these materials, giving Beijing leverage not just over supply, but over the entire value chain.

Saudi Arabia has seen a notable uptick in exploration licensing activity, with hundreds of active exploration licenses (including to Chinese firms) and large new issuance rounds in late 2025, supporting its push to unlock mineral wealth. Beyond its large undeveloped reserves of rare earths, the Kingdom is also positioning itself to become a global rare earths processing hub. With cheap scalable energy and a strategic location between Africa, Asia, and Europe, Saudi Arabia is betting it can become a regional processing hub. As an early sign of confidence, MP Materials, the U.S.’s largest rare earth materials producer, announced it is teaming up with Maaden to build a rare earth refinery in the Kingdom, backed by a $400 million investment and offtake agreement from the U.S. Department of War.

The UAE and Qatar: Innovative Financing as Strategy

The UAE and Qatar aren’t charging into the mining sector with the same ambition as their Saudi cousins, but they are moving capital in targeted, strategic ways, often alongside the United States. Their approach isn’t about building mines or owning processing capacity, but using their formidable financial heft in ways to put their own national stamps on global critical minerals supply chains.

Earlier this year, the U.S. government, Orion Resource Partners, and Abu Dhabi Developmental Holding Company (ADQ), one of the Emirates’ sovereign wealth funds that focuses on economic diversification, launched the Critical Minerals Consortium. This $1.8 billion public-private investment platform (to start) is designed to invest in existing mines or those close to production and manage offtake agreements aligned with the Western partners. Similarly, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, invested $180 million in Techmet, a U.S. government-backed investment fund that invests across the critical minerals value chains with a sharp focus on expanding U.S.-aligned processing, refining, and manufacturing capacity.

This model reflects a broader shift in how strategic minerals are being financed. Instead of governments picking individual mines, they are backing platforms that can finance mines, processes, stack public and private capital, manage offtake, and adapt to political constraints. For Gulf partners, the consortium offers global reach without building a national mining champion. For Orion and Techmet, it lowers political risk and accelerates deal flow. And for Washington, it creates a mechanism to steer supply chains without owning assets. The result is a new model of financial statecraft, blending public capital and private capability in a way few actors outside the Gulf can replicate. These deals also sit alongside a U.S.-led coalition called Pax Silica which is trying to coordinate silicon and semiconductor supply chains, AI and digital policies, and investment around critical technology infrastructure. This effort already has a strong Middle East representation, including the UAE, Qatar, and Israel. (I wrote about the logic behind Israel’s inclusion in Pax Silica here)

In parallel, both Gulf states are also investing directly in mines and global mining companies. For example, in March 2024, UAE-controlled International Holding Company acquired a controlling stake in Mopani Copper Mine in Zambia. Mopani sits at the heart of the Lobito Corridor - a rail and logistics route linking Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to the Angolan coast - that has become a major political and financial priority for the United States and the European Union. DRC is the second largest producer of copper in the world with 8% of global copper reserves. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation recently signed an MOU with IHC so we’ll certainly be watching for more U.S.-UAE deals in critical minerals, including those along priority economic corridors.

It is also worth noting that these moves sit alongside massive Gulf investment commitments to the United States announced around President Trump’s visit to the region last year. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar all pledged hundreds of billions of dollars toward U.S. projects. Some of that money is landing in mining, processing, and refining - clear priority areas for Washington. An example of this is the recent partnership between Emirates Global Aluminium and Century Aluminum to build the first new primary aluminum smelter in the United States in nearly 50 years. The project highlights how Gulf capital is not only securing overseas minerals, but also supporting U.S. mining and industrial capacity at home.

In the broader context of strategic competition and the global race for critical minerals, the region’s strategy is still being written. What may look like newly aggressive moves to secure assets across the value chain actually align closely with a much more assertive U.S. posture. Japan and South Korea have been doing this for decades. The difference is scale. Where Japan and South Korea channeled relatively modest pools of capital to support their industries, the Gulf can deploy vastly larger balance sheets in ways that could undoubtedly tilt the race. We are no doubt in the early days of a major recalibration of alliances and capital focused on diversifying and securing supply chains. This is central to U.S. economic and national security policy, and America’s partners across the Middle East are not bit players. They are fundamental to how Washington is trying to shape and win this race.