Insane Clown Posse’s 2009 track Miracles spends its opening lines marveling at everyday wonders, water, fire, air, and dirt, before landing on its most quoted line: genuine bafflement at how magnets work. The joke landed because magnetism sounds like it should be simple, and it isn’t, even to the people working in it. In cleantech, a second layer of confusion has piled on top of the physics: who gets to make these magnets, what they’re made of, and whether any answer can stop depending on one country.
In April 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce started requiring export licenses for seven rare earth elements: samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium. October 2025 added five more. These rules cover the raw metals, but also finished magnets (every samarium-cobalt (Sm-Co) magnet needs a license now, and so does any neodymium magnet doped with terbium or dysprosium) and the manufacturing technology itself. They also reach down to any component with as little as 0.1% Chinese-origin content, wherever it was built. China refines 90% of all rare earth elements globally and produces about 90% of the world’s magnets, so this isn’t a minor supply hiccup.
There’s a detail in the export rules that’s easy to miss, and it’s not rare earth magnets broadly that are restricted. It’s specifically the heavy rare earths, dysprosium and terbium, the ones that let a magnet hold up under heat. A standard neodymium magnet made only from the light rare earths isn’t restricted at all. So companies like Proterial (formerly Hitachi Metals) are already selling “heavy-rare-earth-free” neodymium magnets as a fairly straightforward workaround. But if there’s anything we’ve learned in the past few years, or months these days, about export bans, it’s that all it takes is China adding light rare earths to the list to throw the whole market into chaos again.
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