If energy is the prime mover, materials are the bottleneck that decides who gets to move.
The software era trained us to think in abstractions: APIs, distribution, marginal cost. The physical era is different. Atoms have geography. They have politics. They have permitting. They have shipping lanes. They have one annoying property: you can’t “move fast and break things” when the thing you’re breaking is the supply chain that keeps your factories alive.
This theme is about two linked realities:
- Critical minerals are the feedstock for electrification, batteries, magnets, electronics, and modern manufacturing.
- Semiconductors are the control layer for everything that moves, senses, targets, or automates.
When either gets constrained, “economic competitiveness” turns into “national security” very quickly.
Subsegments
The Constraint Stack
The critical-materials problem isn’t just extraction. It’s the whole chain:
- Discovery → permitting → financing → build
- Mining → processing/refining → manufacturing into components
- Logistics → inventory → substitution
Most countries can dig holes. Fewer can process at scale. Fewer still can do it with predictable timelines, social license, and economics.
The semiconductor problem is similar:
- It’s not a fab; it’s a global toolchain (equipment, chemicals, gases, wafers, packaging, talent).
- It’s not “chips”; it’s yield, reliability, and volume across multiple nodes.
In both cases, the winners are the systems that make lead times and quality predictable.
Subsegment Map
| Subsegment | Description | Outcome | Key KPIs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Critical Minerals Mining & Processing | Domestic extraction and refining of lithium, rare earths, nickel, copper, and other strategic materials. | Stable, secure supply of industrial inputs for sovereignty and scale. | Controlled supply %; recovery rate; extraction cost/ton; reserve coverage % |
| Semiconductor Manufacturing | Wafer‑fab processes and AI‑driven yield optimization for chip production. | Reliable domestic output enabling compute and automation resilience. | Production volume; domestic supply %; domestic % of global capex; yield % |
Critical Minerals: “The Refining Problem”
A common mistake is to treat minerals like oil: find it, pump it, ship it.
In reality, for many strategic materials the hard part is processing, not mining:
- Processing is capital intensive.
- Processing is chemistry and manufacturing, not just geology.
- Processing has environmental and permitting complexity.
- Processing is where a lot of geopolitical leverage lives.
The “neoindustrial” framing here is practical: if you want domestic scale in batteries, magnets, grid hardware, and defense electronics, you need domestic capacity in the middle of the chain. Otherwise you’re building the last mile on top of someone else’s chokepoint.
Policy matters here because it changes the payout profile. The IRA-era push for domestic clean-energy manufacturing and supply chains doesn’t magically create mines—but it does create demand certainty and incentives that pull processing and component capacity forward.
What to watch
- Permitting timelines and community acceptance (a proxy for social license)
- Processing yields and impurity control (the silent killer)
- Recycling as a second source, not as a moral argument
- Substitution pressure (materials get redesigned when supply chains get scary)
Semiconductors: Volume, Yield, and the “Node Trap”
People talk about semiconductors like there’s one chip and one factory. There isn’t.
The real map looks like:
- Leading edge nodes for bleeding‑edge compute
- “Mature” nodes that quietly run cars, industrial equipment, grid gear, and defense systems
- Packaging and integration that increasingly determine performance
- A long tail of specialty chips where reliability and supply continuity matter more than benchmarks
Neoindustrialization cares about chips for one reason: automation scales when compute is cheap and available.
The CHIPS Act is an explicit recognition of this: chips aren’t just consumer electronics; they’re the control surface of the industrial base.
Building fabs is necessary, but not sufficient. The constraint stack includes:
- Lithography and tool availability
- Ultra‑pure chemicals and gases
- Power and water
- Process control and talent
- Supplier ecosystems that make yield improvements compounding rather than episodic
What to watch
- Yield curves and time‑to‑ramp (the difference between a press release and a factory)
- Domestic capacity for mature nodes (where shortages cause real‑world downtime)
- Packaging and test as a leverage point
- Concentration risk (single‑source dependencies hiding in the bill of materials)
The Big Picture
This theme is not about autarky. It’s about reducing single points of failure.
The goal isn’t “make everything at home.” The goal is:
- predictable supply
- controllable lead times
- resilient production under stress
- and the ability to scale when the world gets weird (because it will)
If you’re looking for the tell, it’s this: when companies start designing products around availability instead of performance, you’re watching the materials constraint become the strategy.