Policy Brief No. 214 — October 2025
AI Governance and the Geopolitics of Extraction Samantha Bradshaw and Kate Munro
Key Points → The infrastructure of artificial intelligence (AI) depends on critical minerals and rare earth elements, making their supply chains a central factor in national security, economic stability, and global technology competition and governance. → Overreliance on supply chains characterized by limited geographic diversification exposes AI commercial and defence industries to trade disruptions, cyber sabotage and strategic leverage. → Diversifying supply chains requires international cooperation that accounts for sustainability, labour standards and transparency to balance national security with environmental and human security concerns.
Introduction In April 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce imposed export controls on seven rare earth elements in response to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods (Baskaran and Schwartz 2025a). These elements are part of a broader set of critical minerals that are not only essential for advanced technologies, including defence applications such as advanced missile systems (Lopez 2024), but also for the hardware that powers AI technologies. While AI is often imagined in terms of algorithms and data, it is also material, requiring rare earth elements and other critical minerals (such as silicon, cobalt and germanium) for faster and more efficient computation. The ongoing struggle to secure access to these resources not only reflects the broader strategic rivalry between the United States and China over AI dominance, but it also reveals the deep political and material dimensions of AI’s design, governance and implementation — dimensions that extend into the often-hidden worlds of resource extraction, environmental security and global supply chains.