Amid an ongoing tariff war with the U.S.—and a temporary truce—the Trump administration is racing to build up domestic mining and processing capabilities, while also developing the global partnerships necessary to eventually undermine China, which controls 90% of the world’s rare earths refining.

In October, Trump inked a deal with Australia for both countries to invest $3 billion in critical minerals projects by mid-2026. Australia is home to the largest publicly traded critical minerals miner in the world, Lynas Rare Earths. Trump then signed a series of bilateral critical minerals deals in eastern and southeastern Asia, including Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia. The U.S. also has new deals with Ukraine, Argentina, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Kazakhstan, and more.

Althaus is specifically developing mining and processing facilities for tungsten—a heat-resistant metal used in electronics and military equipment—and rare earths in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. He sees the most potential in former Soviet Union nations in central Asia.

“The Soviets spent many decades exploring and developing mines. Many of their databases have been left and are quite meticulous,” Althaus said. “This gives companies looking to develop projects in central Asia a jumpstart compared to what would be here in the United States, where most of the opportunities are greenfield—very early stages, very high risk, and very little appetite for investment.”

In November, the Ex-Im Bank offered Cove Capital a $900 million financing letter of interest for the $1.1 billion Kazakh tungsten projects. A separate letter of interest was received from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.

Jeff Dickerson, principal advisor for Rystad Energy research firm, said only a long-term, coordinated effort—essentially a “wartime” approach—both domestically and with international partnerships can lead to success. But it cannot be done without new projects with foreign allies. “The challenge is that the U.S. doesn’t have a strong pipeline of mature mineral projects that are shovel ready,” he said. 

“The cycle of China extracting concessions on the back of mineral geopolitics and weakening the U.S. strategic negotiating position will likely continue without a coordinated, long-term response during the current moment of heightened attention to critical minerals,” Dickerson said, questioning whether the U.S. will maintain a concerted focus for years to come.

New emphasis

The Trump administration is increasingly making financial partnerships with critical minerals developers—even becoming a majority shareholder of U.S. rare earths miner MP Materials—and offering deals for floor-pricing mechanisms to offset China’s recurring dumping practices that aim to eliminate competition.

A native Australian turned New Yorker, Althaus is, naturally, a big fan of this approach. Chinese price dumping has crippled global competition and scared away potential investors, he said.

“By providing a price floor, it removes the question marks; it removes the instability; it removes the most significant risk in funding a project that’s about to go into production,” Althaus said. “It creates a predictability where you can take geology all the way through to profitability. I think there should be a global effort to create transparent markets and prices for the key critical minerals.”

Critical minerals are increasingly included in U.S. negotiations for all foreign deals. In the tariff agreement with Indonesia, for instance, the Asian nation agreed to lift export bans on nickel. The White House leveraged its military support for Ukraine by demanding the rights to its critical minerals in return. And the recent U.S. bailout of Argentina included a partnership on critical minerals mining.

In addition to its strategic defense location, rare earths are even a reason Trump continues to show interest in annexing Greenland from Denmark.

Veteran geologist Greg Barnes, who founded the massive Tanbreez mining project, which remains in development, briefed Trump at the White House during his first presidential term. This year, Critical Metals acquired 92.5% ownership of the Tanbreez project.

Critical Metals CEO Tony Sage is keen to supply the U.S. with desired rare earths, and the company recently received a letter of intent for a $120 million Ex-Im Bank loan. The goal is to start construction by the end of 2026.

“There’s an absolute need to make sure that more than 50% of the supply of these heavy rare earths come from outside of China—mined and processed outside of China,” Sage told Fortune.

Regardless of any long-shot annexation bids, Sage said Greenland can and should be a key ally to the U.S. for critical minerals. “They definitely don’t want to be part of the U.S., but I think they’ll be pro-U.S.,” he said.

For his part, Althaus said he sees all the international deals as progress, and not as competition for his Cove Capital.

“I think it’s a positive, and I think we’ll start to see a lot more happen in the coming months in terms of the U.S. and collaboration with other countries.”

Turns out, nobody fed the dog and so all the kids “scatter to their corners,” he told Fortune’s Brainstorm AI audience in San Francisco on Monday. 

The senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon says the new generative AI-powered Alexa+, which runs on Echo hardware and can integrate with other devices like Amazon’s Ring security cameras, aims to ease the constant mental load in a household: remembering whether the pets ate, restaurants each family member pitched and saw vetoed, and regular grocery orders. The idea is to have “ambient” artificial intelligence around your house so that devices can assist in tasks, chores, and other household command center issues, said Panay.

The new Alexa+ is much more conversational, Panay said, and you no longer have to pronounce everything perfectly and discretely in order for it (or her, as Panay refers to the virtual assistant) to understand you.

“She’s the best DJ on the planet, in my opinion,” said Panay. “You have a personal shopper, you have a butler, you have a personal assistant, you have your home manager. Different people use Alexa for different things, and now she’s pretty much supercharged,” Panay said.

In addition to confirming that the dogs have not been fed, Panay said he used Alexa+ on Sunday night to head off another age-old debate: where the family should go for dinner. Both dinner decisions and pet chores are “classic fight[s] in my house,” Panay told the Brainstorm AI audience.

His youngest had previously suggested a few restaurants she wanted to visit for a quick bite and hadn’t yet been to, and Panay asked Alexa to remind them which ones his daughter suggested specifically. It was a sushi joint and she enjoyed it, Panay said. That type of ambient listening and assistance with debate is the point, he said, and stops people needing to pull out their phones and start typing and scrolling for information.   

From there, Panay said Alexa can also take more concrete actions like making a reservation on dining platform OpenTable, ordering delivery on nights in, getting an Uber, and handling home issues such as telling you how many packages were delivered or the number of guests who stopped by. Panay said Amazon has more than 150 partners to aid in these integrations, although there is work ahead to get more partners on board, he added.  

Thus far, Alexa+ has been rolled out to early-access users and this week the product is available to those on a lengthy waitlist, said Panay, and it’s been boosted by Amazon’s advertising. This week, the product is being released to anyone with an Echo device. The business monetization model involves “flywheels” from Amazon’s $2.4 trillion retail ecosystem, particularly around shopping for clothes, groceries, and other consumer items. “If you’re shopping on the grocery list and order groceries often enough, Alexa knows what you’re doing, and ultimately, can just order ahead of time for you moving forward,” he said.

Ultimately, Panay envisions users wanting “your assistant everywhere you go” because “the more it understands about you, the more informed it is, the better it can serve your needs.” And while Panay said there will be continued innovation from Amazon in this space, he refused to reveal any specific products. He said Amazon has a “lab full of ideas,” but most won’t make it out of that lab. 

Much is riding on this ban—and not just in Australia. Other countries in the region are watching Canberra’s ban closely. Malaysia, for example, said that it also plans to bar under-16s from accessing social media platforms starting next year. 

Other countries are considering less drastic ways to control teenagers’ social media use. On Nov. 30, Singapore said it would ban the use of smartphones on secondary school campuses. 

Yet, governments in Australia and Malaysia argue a full social media ban is necessary to protect youth from online harms such as cyberbullying, sexual exploitation and financial scams.

Tech companies have had varied responses to the social media ban. 

Some, like Meta, have been compliant, starting to remove Australian under-16s from Instagram, Threads and Facebook from Dec. 4, a week before the national ban kicks in. The social media giant reaffirmed their commitment to adhere to Australian law, but called for app stores to instead be held accountable for age verification.

“The government should require app stores to verify age and obtain parental approval whenever teens under 16 download apps, eliminating the need for teens to verify their age multiple times across different apps,” a Meta spokesperson said.

Others, like YouTube, sought to be excluded from the ban, with parent company Google even threatening to sue the Australian federal government in July 2025—to no avail.

However, experts told Fortune that these bans may, in fact, be harmful, denying young people the place to develop their own identities and the space to learn healthy digital habits.

“A healthy part of the development process and grappling with the human condition is the process of finding oneself. Consuming cultural material, connecting with others, and finding your community and identity is part of that human experience,” says Andrew Yee, an assistant professor at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU)’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information.

Social media “allows young people to derive information, gain affirmation and build community,” says Sun Sun Lim, a professor in communications and technology at the Singapore Management University (SMU), who also calls bans “a very rough tool.”

Yee, from NTU, also points out that young people can turn to platforms like YouTube to learn about hobbies that may not be available in their local communities. 

Forcing kids to go “cold turkey” off social media could also make for a difficult transition to the digital world once they are of age, argues Chew Han Ei, a senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in the National University of Singapore (NUS).

“The sensible way is to slowly scaffold [social media use], since it’s not that healthy social media usage can be cultivated immediately,” Chew says.

Enforcement

Australia plans to enforce its social media ban by imposing a fine of 49.5 million Australian dollars (US$32.9 million) on social media companies which fail to take steps to ban those under 16 from having accounts on their platforms.

Malaysia has yet to explain how it might enforce its own social media ban, but communications minister Fahmi Fadzil suggested that social media platforms could verify users through government-issued documents like passports. 

Though young people may soon figure out how to maintain their access to social media. “Youths are savvy, and I am sure they will find ways to circumvent these,” says Yee of NTU. He also adds that young may migrate to platforms that aren’t traditionally defined as social media, such as gaming sites like Roblox. Other social media platforms, like YouTube, also don’t require accounts, thus limiting the efficacy of these bans, he adds.

Forcing social media platforms to collect huge amounts of personal data and government-issued identity documents could also lead to data privacy issues. “It’s very intimate personally identifiable information that’s being collected to verify age—from passports to digital IDs,” Chew, from NUS, says. “Somewhere along the line, a breach will happen.”

Moving towards healthy social media use

Ironically, some experts argue that a ban may absolve social media platforms of responsibility towards their younger users. 

“Social media bans impose an unfair burden on parents to closely supervise their children’s media use,” says Lim of SMU. “As for the tech platform, they can reduce child safety safeguards that make their platforms safer, since now the assumption is that young people are banned from them, and should not have been venturing [onto them] and opening themselves up to risks.”

And rather than allow digital harms to proliferate, social media platforms should be held responsible for ensuring they “contribute to intentional and purposeful use”, argues Yee.

This could mean regulating companies’ use of user interface features like auto-play and infinite scroll, or ensuring algorithmic recommendations are not pushing harmful content to users.

“Platforms profit—lucratively, if I may add—from people’s use, so they have a responsibility to ensure that the product is safe and beneficial for its users,” Yee explains. 

Finally, conversations on safe social media use should center the voices of young people, Yee adds.

“I think we need to come to a consensus as to what a safe and rights-respecting online space is,” he says. “This must include young people’s voices, as policy design should be done in consultation with the people the policy is affecting.”