Lithium Americas Draws First $435m From DOE Loan as Trump Mineral Bets Pile Up
The DOE's equity-backed funding of Thacker Pass is the latest in a string of state-directed critical minerals investments spanning three continents.
Lithium Americas secured the first $435 million drawdown from its $2.23 billion Department of Energy loan on Friday (2026-08-14), officially unlocking federal backing for its Thacker Pass lithium project in Nevada and pushing Washington's critical minerals program into active deployment.7
The DOE restructured the loan to take a 5% equity stake in Lithium Americas and a separate 5% stake in the Thacker Pass joint venture with General Motors — a structure that places the U.S. government directly on the cap table of a commodity-producing asset rather than in the more familiar role of lender of last resort.7
Westwater Resources also obtained a $25 million investment from the U.S. Export-Import Bank to develop an Alabama graphite deposit. Graphite is a foundational anode material for battery cells, and domestic processing capacity remains limited.7
The domestic awards sit alongside a far larger overseas program. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation signed a $1 billion deal with Gecamines, the DRC state mining company, and Mercuria, the Swiss commodity trader, to export Congolese copper. The DFC also committed to financing a railway in Angola worth $550 million and another in the DRC worth up to $1 billion, infrastructure that would eventually move copper and cobalt toward American buyers.1
To de-risk private capital, the DFC recruited Chubb to organize $20 billion in private-sector insurance policies and contributed a matching $20 billion in reinsurance to bring premiums down. The DFC once disbursed $5–10 billion annually. Managing a potential $200 billion loan book plus a $5 billion equity fund is a different institution entirely.1
What makes the DRC so consequential, and so contested, is the underlying geography of production. Chinese entities hold stakes in an estimated 90% of Congolese mining projects, according to the former Gécamines chairman speaking to the Economist. In February, a consortium called Orion CMC, which includes U.S. government backing, agreed to buy a 40% stake in the only Western-controlled copper and cobalt mines in the country.2
Beijing has not been passive. On Monday (2026-06-22), China issued fresh export controls targeting U.S. firms, including two named rare-earth companies. Bryan Bille, a policy analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, described the move as a "warning shot."6
Building alternatives through diplomatic channels has produced mixed results. Zambia's then-Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe issued a sharply worded six-page statement accusing Washington of tying a minerals agreement to roughly $2 billion in health aid while demanding preferential mineral access. The deal collapsed. USA Rare Earth announced a $2.8 billion acquisition of Serra Verde, a Brazilian rare earths miner, through a bilateral route instead.4
On Friday (2026-05-29), Trump signed a memo directing the Office of Personnel Management to offer salaries as high as $400,000 to recruit 400 federal employees capable of negotiating mineral agreements. A senior White House official told reporters on Wednesday (2026-06-03) that the administration is pursuing a global alliance of mineral-rich partners including Australia and nations in Africa and South America to counter China's position.3,5
The pace of commitments is accelerating, but so is the complexity. The Gecamines deal pairs a U.S. agency with a commodity trading house in a jurisdiction where Chinese counterparties control most competing assets. The Zambia episode shows how quickly deal flow can stall when aid and access get linked. The Thacker Pass equity structure — federal government as co-investor alongside GM — has no real precedent in U.S. energy policy. How the DOE exercises its equity rights in a commercial dispute is untested, and that question will sharpen as the project moves through permitting and construction.7,1,4