US Takes $450 Million Stake in Elmet to Secure Tungsten Supply
The US Department of War has taken a $450 million equity stake in Elmet Group to secure the American tungsten supply chain. The investment takes the form of redeemable preferred equity and is being run through the Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment programme in coordination with the Economic Defense Unit.
$165 million of the package is allocated directly to manufacturing and processing operations in Maine, Michigan and Ohio. The agreement was signed by Assistant Secretary of War for Industrial Base Policy Mike Cadenazzi, Elmet Group chairman and chief executive Peter V. Anania, and Economic Defense Unit director George K. Kollitides II.
Why tungsten
Tungsten has the highest melting point of any known metal at 3,422 degrees Celsius. Its density is close to gold’s, and its hardness is exceptional. Those three properties make it one of the hardest materials in defence manufacturing to substitute.
The principal applications:
- Kinetic energy penetrators: the heavy cores in tank sabot rounds
- Rocket motor nozzles: throat components exposed to gas flows in the thousands of degrees
- Hypersonic vehicle surfaces: nose caps and leading edges facing aerodynamic heating
- Carbide cutting tools: tungsten carbide inserts used to machine airframe and engine parts
- Counterweights and balance masses: in flight control surfaces and helicopter rotor blades
The Department’s announcement lists the systems that depend on it: F-35, Patriot PAC-3, Trident D5, the Next Generation Interceptor, Precision Strike Missile, Javelin, AEGIS, THAAD, and the Virginia- and Columbia-class submarines.
The bottleneck
The numbers frame the problem. China controls roughly 85 percent of global tungsten supply and 40 percent of molybdenum. That dominance sits in processing rather than extraction. Converting tungsten ore into a usable intermediate — ammonium paratungstate, or APT — is chemically complex and capital intensive, and Western capacity was largely dismantled over decades.
The Department says the bottleneck affects more than 100 US defence programmes. The facility planned under the Elmet investment would be North America’s only independent ammonium paratungstate production plant.
Who Elmet is
Elmet Technologies is the only fully US-owned, vertically integrated producer of tungsten and molybdenum, operating across the chain from ore processing to precision-engineered components. The company went public in 2026 and recently expanded into Europe. Under the agreement it is standing up a new division, Elmet Refining & Trading, to coordinate material sourcing and delivery. Roughly 1,200 downstream jobs across manufacturing, engineering and logistics are expected.
The method is the story
The structure of the investment reflects a change in how Washington approaches critical materials. Traditionally the tools were grants, long-term offtake agreements or strategic stockpiling. Taking equity puts the state directly into the company’s capital structure — a pattern seen since 2025 with MP Materials in rare earths and Lithium Americas, now extended to tungsten.
Redeemable preferred equity lets the government supply capital without taking operational control, and recover the investment when defined conditions are met. In practice it functions as capital support bundled with a long-term fixed-price purchase guarantee.
The wider picture
Turkey holds one of the world’s larger tungsten reserves, at the Uludağ deposit near Bursa, worked at limited scale for many years and treated as a strategic reserve in Eti Maden and MTA assessments. In a material where global supply concentrates in one country, holding reserves only converts into economic and strategic value once processing capacity exists — which is precisely what the Elmet move is buying.
Europe is on a similar track. The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act lists tungsten as a strategic raw material and sets a 40 percent domestic processing target for 2030. As NATO states push to raise munitions output, securing ore and intermediate products has stopped being industrial policy and become defence planning.
Sources
- US Department of War, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Industrial Base Policy announcement, 14 September 2026
- Elmet Group corporate statement and establishment of Elmet Refining & Trading
- Defence Industry Europe, 14 September 2026
