Rare Earth Rush: Strategic Minerals and Tech's New Resource Wars
May 6, 2026
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For thirty years, the United States largely ignored critical minerals. We mined less, processed less, and stockpiled less — while China quietly built the most dominant mineral supply chain in modern history. When China imposed rare earth export restrictions in 2024, manufacturers from Detroit to Tokyo scrambled. The invisible inputs powering electric vehicles, semiconductors, AI data centers, and defense systems had suddenly become visible — and vulnerable.
In this episode of TechSurge, host Sriram Viswanathan speaks with Dr. Gracelin Baskaran, Director of the Critical Mineral Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A mining economist with over a decade of field experience across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, Gracelin is one of the sharpest minds working on how the world secures the raw materials that make advanced technology possible.
Gracelin brings a clarifying perspective to a topic that is often framed as a geopolitical contest: the real challenge, she argues, is economic. Until mining in allied countries is genuinely profitable — until the capital, energy infrastructure, processing technology, and policy stability are all in place — supply chain security remains aspirational, regardless of how many executive orders get signed.
Sriram and Gracelin work through the full landscape: what critical minerals actually are and why the term matters, how China built its dominance not just through geology but through industrial strategy and foreign policy, and why the 29-year average timeline from mineral discovery to production creates a fundamental tension with the pace of technology investment. They examine the gap the CHIPS Act left unfilled, the case for aggregating allied demand to change the economics of new mines, and what tech CEOs are dangerously wrong to assume about their own supply chains.
They also dig into the emerging policy architecture: Project Vault as a demand-driven civilian stockpile, the critical minerals ministerial that brought 55 countries to Washington, and the role of recycling and AI-driven exploration in accelerating a supply chain that cannot be built on mining alone.
Ultimately, Gracelin argues that America's greatest advantage is not its geology — it is its capacity to innovate. But innovation without investment, and investment without durable policy, will not be enough. The window is open. The question is whether the commitment holds.
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Episode Links:
- Connect with Gracelin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gracelinbaskaran/
- Learn more about CSIS Critical Minerals Security Program: https://www.csis.org/programs/energy-security-and-climate-change-program/critical-minerals-security
Timestamps:
[00:00] China’s Rare Earth Wake-Up Call
[02:57] The Origin Story Behind Gracelin
[05:02] What “Critical Minerals” Actually Means
[08:17] Saudi Arabia’s Mineral Strategy Playbook
[10:33] Why Economics Matters More Than Geology
[13:54] Why New Mines Take Decades to Build
[16:42] China’s Supply Chain Dominance Explained
[24:57] America’s Workforce and Processing Problem
[27:05] Innovation vs Scale in the Mineral Race
[29:54] Can the US Rebuild Mineral Processing?
[33:10] Startups, Capital, and the Mining Challenge
[35:02] Belt and Road, Security, and Global Supply
[41:19] The CHIPS Act’s Missing Ingredient
[46:21] The Policy Blueprint for Critical Minerals
[51:59] Project Vault Explained
[53:54] Rapid-Fire Takeaways and Final Reality Check
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The Race to Build the Next Trillion-Dollar AI Chip Company
Almost 2% of U.S. GDP will be spent on AI infrastructure this year, nearly double 2025's figure. But beneath those headline numbers, the composition of that spending has quietly flipped: for the first time, dollars spent on running models in production now outweigh dollars spent training them.
In this episode of TechSurge, host David Goldman speaks with Austin Lyons, a semiconductor analyst at Creative Strategies, co-host of the Semi Doped podcast, and author of the Chipstrat newsletter. Lyons previously worked as a hardware engineer at Intel and as a product manager on John Deere's autonomous tractor and Blue River Technology teams before turning to full-time chip industry analysis.
The conversation opens with why AI buyers have moved from assembling commoditized parts to buying entire pre-integrated systems, tracing how Nvidia's rack-scale approach, exemplified by its 72-GPU Grace Blackwell racks, made turnkey deployment the default, and why that raises the bar for any chip startup trying to compete. Lyons and Goldman then unpack how inference workloads have split into two distinct problems, prefill and decode, and how that split created an opening for SRAM-based challengers to outperform general-purpose GPUs on decode speed.
From there, the discussion turns to the rise of neoclouds, the GPU-rental companies that grew into public businesses worth well over $100 billion combined, and why so many traditional investors missed them. Lyons and Goldman work through the circular financing debate head-on: the mechanics of Nvidia's equity stakes, GPU-backed debt, and hyperscaler off-take agreements that critics compare to dot-com-era vendor financing, and the counterargument that demand is simply outrunning fixed supply.
The episode closes on Lyons's own framework for identifying the next trillion-dollar chip company, built on four conditions including the ability to run trillion-parameter models at rack scale, beat an incumbent on a key performance metric, and land a frontier anchor customer, along with a look at how AI-assisted chip design is lowering the barrier for more companies, from OpenAI to electric vehicle makers, to design their own custom silicon.
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The Nobel Winner Who Built Google's Quantum Computer: Why I'm Building NVIDIA of Quantum
In this episode, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. John Martinis reveals how his breakthrough in superconducting qubits made quantum physics real at macroscopic scale and what it means for the future of technology. The former lead of Google's Quantum AI lab explains why quantum computing is so fragile, why a lot of hype has a low chance to work, and why his fabless company Qolab could be the Nvidia of quantum computing.
In this conversation, Dr. Martinis joins Tech Surge to explain the science behind macroscopic quantum coherence, the engineering challenges of scaling quantum computers, and how hybrid quantum-classical computing will shape the future of technology.
The conversation covers:
✅ How the superconducting qubit breakthrough won the Nobel Prize in Physics
✅ Why Nature wants to destroy quantum coherence and why quantum is fragile
✅ From academic physics to building Google's quantum computer
✅ The engineering challenge of scaling quantum computing beyond the lab
✅ Why a lot of quantum computing hype has a low chance to work
✅ How Qolab's fabless model could scale quantum hardware
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Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan on 40 Years of Contrarian Bets in Semiconductors
Silicon Valley was built on semiconductors, but for nearly two decades, venture capital shifted its attention towards software. Today, AI is changing that as the demand for compute, memory and networking explodes, hardware is once again at the centre of the industry's biggest bets.
In this episode of TechSurge, host Michael Marks speaks with Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel and one of the semiconductor industry's most influential investors and executives. The conversation traces Tan's journey from studying nuclear engineering at MIT to leading Cadence's turnaround, investing in more than 500 technology companies, and now steering Intel through one of the most significant transformations in its history.
Tan shares his VC conviction on backing semiconductor startups when most venture investors favored software, and why he believes AI's next breakthroughs will come from advances in memory, packaging, photonics, cooling and high-speed connectivity. He also opens up on the leadership philosophy that defined his time at Cadence, where listening to customers and building a culture of responsiveness became the foundation of the company's revival.
Wearing his CEO hat, Tan explains Intel's long-term strategy, why vertical integration still matters, how the company plans to reconnect with the startup ecosystem, and why missing another technology wave is not an option.
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