By: Jeffrey D. Bean
In March, the U.S. State Department announced a Pax Silica fund, beginning with a modest $250 million investment, to support projects to secure the critical and emerging technology supply chain. Pax Silica is a U.S.-led group of 10 nations, so far. The signatories include India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Australia, and now Sweden along with key non-signing observers like the Netherlands. According to U.S. Undersecretary of State Jacob Helberg, who leads the initiative within the U.S. government, the intention is to grow this fund to $1 trillion with the help of private sector players among Pax Silica members, such as Japan’s SoftBank, Singapore's Temasek, and the UAE’s Mubadala Investment Company. The objective is to mitigate and offset crucial Chinese chokepoints in artificial intelligence (AI), technology, and minerals supply chains by developing market-based alternatives. As it takes shape, Pax Silica is part of a set of overlapping but uncoordinated initiatives by the U.S. government. At the same time, Pax Silica’s mandate and mission are wide and getting wider: energy security has been added to the agenda, likely due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and rising AI energy needs. These additions risk expanding the remit in a manner that dampens utility and focus.
Pax Silica joins a number of overlapping multilateral tech partnerships being spearheaded by the United States, ostensibly with a similar purpose in supporting technology supply chains. FORGE — formerly the 15-member Mineral Security Partnership (MSP) — is a State Department-led grouping that will now seek to establish price protections (and price floors) to mitigate coercive impacts. But whether such price floors can be functional or are necessary across the whole range of critical minerals and rare earth elements remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the U.S. Export-Import Bank’s Project Vault represents a new U.S. effort for an old tactic: stockpiling. This initiative will store critical minerals as backstop for domestic commercial use until times of crisis. The project aims to establish a U.S. Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve supported by $12 billion in public and private sector commitments. The funding will presumably be leveraged to support projects overseas for extraction while also paying for imports and storage for materials of high dependency. Meanwhile, the Quad (Australia, India, Japan, United States) has a critical mineral working group and in July 2025 announced a Quad critical mineral initiative following the foreign ministers’ meeting in Washington. While supply chain monitoring and information sharing has been a focal point of the Quad for several years, specific initiatives under this banner reportedly include e-waste recycling and minerals recovery and reprocessing among the mutually designated 20 critical minerals that the partners share in common.
The United States also hosted a pair of important ministerial meetings on critical minerals in early 2026. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent hosted the first on January 12, which featured finance ministers from the G7, along with ministers from Australia, India, Mexico, South Korea and the European Union. The meeting focused mostly on information sharing related to Chinese coercive practices in the critical mineral supply chain and the need to build decoupled resilient alternatives. The second, larger, convening in February hosted by the State Department and Secretary of State Marco Rubio brought together 54 countries — many represented by their foreign ministries — to provide an opportunity to discuss challenges in critical mineral supply chains, offtake opportunities, and bilateral diplomacy. The United States announced nine new bilateral memoranda of understanding (MoU) signings, confirmed that ten had previously been signed, and stated negotiations were underway for seventeen others. These focused on a combination of mining, tech transfer, and offtake agreements.
While the impetus of Pax Silica and other critical mineral initiatives reflects a bipartisan shared concern in the United States to secure critical mineral supply chains crucial for technology leadership, the challenge for the Trump administration is to coordinate these various initiatives into a comprehensive strategy and focus each initiative accordingly. This will be challenging for two reasons. First, the president has repeatedly voiced skepticism toward the value of multilateralism and treaty allies and withdrawn from numerous international organizations. In this environment, engagement on critical minerals with European partners like the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Sweden in Pax Silica, and broader EU partners in the G7 and FORGE will be key. Second, the absence of a dedicated inter-agency coordination mechanism over these initiatives reinforces the sense that this is a scattershot approach, no matter how well-structured and congruent with U.S. interests each initiative may be on its own merits.
Keeping these limitations in mind, if the U.S. government can facilitate practical, targeted bilateral engagements with downstream players like Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and India and major players upstream like Canada and Australia for mining and processing under the banner of Pax Silica and FORGE, these could support derisking semiconductor, AI, and critical mineral supply chains provided key Global South actors (home to many critical minerals) are engaged effectively and equitably. A clear and delineated strategy with mutual benefit, economic security, and private sector engagement at the forefront will give the United States an opportunity to stabilize one important pillar (securing upstream inputs) needed as part of the wider effort to sustain U.S. leadership in critical and emerging technologies.
Jeffrey D. Bean is the Program Manager for Technology Policy and Editor at ORF America.