The Periodic Table of Who's Actually Building
50 critical minerals scored by domestic processing status — who's building, who's emerging, and where the gaps remain.
The Periodic Table of Who's Actually Building
Every square is a mineral the United States has declared critical to national security. The company name tells you who's processing it domestically. The color tells you whether anyone is. Watch the table fill — and count the squares that stay dark.
The United States imports more than half of its supply for 43 of the 50 minerals on the USGS critical minerals list. For 14 of those, import reliance is 100%. This is not a theoretical vulnerability — it is the structural foundation of American manufacturing, defense, and energy infrastructure resting on supply chains that run through geopolitical adversaries.
This interactive maps every critical mineral against the companies actually working on domestic processing capacity. Each square tells you who is building (or whether anyone is building at all), what the mineral is used for, and how dependent the U.S. currently is on imports. The category filters let you slice by end-use — defense, energy, semiconductors, infrastructure, or health — to see where concentration risk clusters.
The data synthesizes USGS mineral commodity summaries, company disclosures, DOE critical materials assessments, and trade databases. Import percentages reflect net import reliance as a share of apparent consumption. Company assignments represent the most advanced domestic processing effort identified as of early 2026 — not all are at commercial scale.
Start with the "VACANT" squares. These are minerals with no identified domestic processor at any stage. Then look for the sole-producer warnings — minerals where a single company represents the entire U.S. processing base. The ratio bar at the top tells the headline number, but the pattern of vacancies tells the real story.
Originally published alongside Telemetry