In October 2024, a lithium company in Nevada closed a loan worth $2.26 billion. The lender was not a bank. It was the United States Department of Energy. The borrower, Lithium Americas, was building the processing plant for Thacker Pass, a deposit in Humboldt County that holds the largest known measured lithium resource and reserve in the world. The loan carried interest at the long-dated U.S. Treasury rate with no spread at all — terms no commercial lender would offer, for a project no commercial lender would have funded alone at that size.
Thacker Pass is not an outlier anymore. It is the pattern. The Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office closed the $2.26 billion loan — $1.97 billion of principal plus capitalized interest — after a conditional commitment in March 2024, and General Motors took a 38% asset-level stake in the project for $625 million in cash and letters of credit. Phase 1 is designed to produce 40,000 tonnes a year of battery-grade lithium carbonate, enough for roughly 800,000 electric vehicles. In October 2025 the project drew its first $435 million tranche, with $182 million of debt service deferred over the first five years. The federal government is not just encouraging this mine. It is financing it, on terms that reshape the project's economics.
Nine months after the Thacker Pass loan closed, the Pentagon went further. In July 2025 the Department of Defense bought $400 million of preferred stock in MP Materials, the operator of Mountain Pass — America's only operating rare earth mine — becoming its largest single shareholder with roughly a 15% diluted stake. The package added a $150 million loan to expand heavy rare earth separation, a ten-year price floor of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium oxide, and a ten-year commitment to buy all the output of a new magnet plant. Apple committed $500 million to buy American-made magnets from the company, and JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs provided $1 billion in construction financing. A government that once only regulated mines now owns a piece of one.
The export-credit side of the same shift is the Export-Import Bank. Its China and Transformational Exports Program, created in the 2019 reauthorization, reserves at least 20% of the bank's roughly $135 billion financing authority — about $27 billion — to counter Chinese export support and advance U.S. leadership in transformational technologies. In January 2025 the bank launched its Supply Chain Resiliency Initiative, aimed squarely at critical minerals and rare earths. The letters of interest followed in quick succession: $120 million for Critical Metals Corp's Tanbreez rare earth project in Greenland in June 2025, $250 million for Highland Copper's Copperwood project in Michigan in September 2025, $200 million for REalloys' mine-to-magnet supply chain in October 2025, and more than $2.2 billion in letters of interest for allied critical-minerals projects in Australia announced the same month.
The scale of the public commitment is now measurable. Public-finance commitments to critical minerals in advanced economies reached about $65 billion in 2025, more than four times the roughly $15 billion committed in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency's 2026 outlook. Governments are writing larger cheques while total investment in the sector shrinks — overall critical-minerals investment fell 9% in 2025, and exploration spending fell by more than 10%. The money is not flowing everywhere. It is flowing to the projects governments have chosen.
That is the risk in the story, and it deserves to be stated plainly. A commitment is not a disbursement. A letter of interest is not a loan. The IEA itself notes a wide gap between announced public commitments and actual outlays, and that commitments remain concentrated in mining while refining — the stage where the real bottleneck sits — is starved of investment. A project that wins a government cheque still has to survive permitting, construction, and a commodity price that has already humbled an entire generation of lithium developers. Public money de-risks a project. It does not make it a good one.
The implication for financiers is a new kind of due diligence. The question is no longer only whether a deposit is economic. It is whether the project sits inside the circle of government support, what form that support takes — loan, equity, price floor, offtake, or letter — and what happens if the politics change before the money is drawn. In critical minerals, the sovereign is now a counterparty. Price that relationship the way you would price any other.
Sources: Lithium Americas, “Lithium Americas Closes $2.26 Billion U.S. DOE ATVM Loan” (October 2024: $2.26 billion loan, $1.97 billion principal; General Motors 38% stake for $625 million; Phase 1 target 40,000 tonnes per annum of battery-quality lithium carbonate), https://lithiumamericas.com/news/news-details/2024/Lithium-Americas-Closes-2.26-Billion-U.S.-DOE-ATVM-Loan/. Lithium Americas, first drawdown of $435 million from the DOE loan (October 20, 2025; $182 million debt-service deferral over five years), https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/lithium-americas-receives-first-435m-tranche-from-doe-39692. MP Materials / U.S. Department of Defense package (July 10, 2025: $400 million preferred equity investment, approximately 15% diluted stake, $150 million loan, ten-year $110 per kilogram NdPr price floor, $1 billion JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs construction financing; Apple $500 million magnet commitment), https://www.skillings.net/mp-materials-delivers/. Export-Import Bank of the United States, China and Transformational Exports Program and Supply Chain Resiliency Initiative (CTEP reserves at least 20% of approximately $135 billion financing authority; SCRI finalized January 8, 2025), https://exim.gov/news/president-trump-strengthens-export-import-bank-united-states-supports-jobs-establishing-board. Critical Metals Corp EXIM letter of interest, $120 million, Tanbreez, Greenland (June 16, 2025), http://www.stockwatch.com/news/item/u-z9468997-u!crml-20250616/u/crml. REalloys $200 million EXIM letter of interest (October 29, 2025) and more than $2.2 billion in EXIM letters of interest for Australian projects, https://prismmediawire.com/blackboxstocks-inc-nasdaq-blbx-merger-target-realloys-secures-200-million-letter-of-interest-from-u-s-exim-bank-to-advance-north-americas-first-fully-integrated-mine-to-magnet-supply-ch/. International Energy Agency, Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 (public-finance commitments about $65 billion in 2025 versus about $15 billion in 2023; overall investment down 9% in 2025; exploration down more than 10%), as reported by Industrial Info Resources, https://www.industrialinfo.com/news/article/iea-global-critical-minerals-risks-became-realities-in-2025--360418.