A metal most investors have never traded is suddenly one of the most consequential commodities on the planet. Tungsten, the dense, heat-resistant element packed into bunker-buster bombs, armor-piercing rounds, fighter jet components, and missile systems, has seen its price explode in 2026 as China tightens its grip on supply. The squeeze, detailed in CNBC’s reporting on the metal’s national security stakes, has triggered a scramble across Western defense supply chains that analysts warn will persist long after the Iran conflict fades from the headlines.
The numbers are stark. Tungsten prices climbed from roughly $900 per metric tonne unit at the end of 2025 to north of $3,000 by April 2026, a surge of more than 230 percent in a matter of months. Investment research firm The Oregon Group reported that Rotterdam ammonium paratungstate, the benchmark traded form, reached $3,185 per metric ton unit, up 350 percent year-to-date and nearly 900 percent over a twelve-month span. For a material that rarely makes financial headlines, the move ranks among the most violent commodity repricings of the decade.
Why Tungsten Matters
Tungsten is not a luxury input. It has the highest melting point of any metal, extraordinary density, and hardness that makes it irreplaceable in applications where substitutes simply do not exist. Defense manufacturers rely on it for kinetic penetrators, the heavy darts inside armor-piercing rounds, as well as for the cores of certain munitions, the nozzles of rocket motors, and components inside aircraft and missiles. Industrial users need it for cutting tools, drilling equipment, and high-performance alloys.
The problem is concentration. China has dominated the global tungsten industry for decades, producing more than 80 percent of the world’s supply and consuming over half of it domestically. That dominance gives Beijing enormous leverage at precisely the moment Western militaries need the metal most. The vast quantities of munitions expended in recent conflicts, combined with weapons shipped to Ukraine and the demands of the Iran campaign, have left American and allied defense contractors hunting for tungsten just as the largest supplier pulled back.
Beijing Replaces Quotas With a Chokehold
The mechanism behind the price spike is a deliberate policy shift. China scrapped its longstanding quota system in favor of a tightly controlled export licensing regime that left just 15 authorized companies able to ship tungsten material abroad. The effect was immediate and severe. Ammonium paratungstate exports slumped from 782 tonnes in 2024 to 243 tonnes over the first eleven months of the following year, and by early 2026 they had nearly vanished altogether.
The timing is what alarms defense planners. Western nations at war need tungsten more than they have in years, whether for weapons or the industrial tools that build them, and the dominant distributor chose that moment to throttle shipments. The episode echoes Beijing’s playbook on rare earths and other strategic materials, where control over upstream supply has become an instrument of geopolitical pressure. Our coverage of copper prices hitting record highs amid Hormuz tensions and AI demand traces a parallel dynamic in another critical metal, while our look at China and US tariff maneuvering shows how mineral leverage fits into the broader trade standoff.
A Decade Without Domestic Mines
The United States enters this crisis from a position of striking vulnerability. America has had no active commercial tungsten mine since 2015, leaving it almost entirely dependent on imports for a metal its military cannot do without. That gap did not appear overnight, but it has become acute as great-power competition sharpens and supply chains weaponize.
Washington is moving to close it. The Trump administration has made reducing dependence on Chinese tungsten a stated priority, and the Pentagon has set January 1, 2027 as the deadline after which American defense contractors must source the metal exclusively from non-Chinese suppliers. The mandate specifically targets procurement from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea for defense applications, an effort to wall off critical munitions production from adversary-controlled supply. Analysts are also watching for potential federal stockpile expansion, with reports pointing to roughly $2 billion in planned purchases aimed at building a strategic buffer.
The deadline is ambitious given how thoroughly China dominates the market, and it places enormous pressure on the handful of non-Chinese projects racing to reach commercial scale. For defense primes, the clock is now a planning constraint as real as any budget line.
Almonty’s Sangdong Mine Steps Into the Gap
The most prominent answer to the shortage is rising in South Korea. Almonty Industries, a Canadian-listed miner, has fired up its flagship Sangdong mine in Gangwon Province after roughly three decades of dormancy. The mill began processing ore in early April, with its first phase designed to handle around 640,000 tonnes annually. Industry observers regard Sangdong as the most significant China-free source of tungsten in development, projected to supply close to 7 percent of global output once it fully ramps.
The strategic value of that supply has not been lost on Washington. The United States has explicitly exempted Almonty’s tungsten ores, concentrates, and oxides from retaliatory tariffs, a signal of how badly allied-sourced material is needed. For a metal where even a single percentage point of non-Chinese supply carries outsized importance, a project capable of delivering 7 percent of the world’s tungsten represents a meaningful crack in Beijing’s near-monopoly.
Still, one mine does not solve a structural problem. Even at full production, Sangdong covers only a fraction of global demand, and the lead times to develop new deposits stretch across years. The episode is a reminder that supply chains for critical materials cannot be rebuilt at the speed of a price spike, and that the West’s tungsten dependence is a vulnerability that took a decade to create and will take years to unwind.
A Shock That Outlasts the Headlines
The tungsten squeeze illustrates a broader truth about modern security. Wars are won not only on the battlefield but in the industrial base that supplies it, and control over obscure inputs like tungsten can prove as decisive as any weapons system. The Iran conflict accelerated demand and exposed the gap, but the underlying problem, a Western defense complex reliant on an adversary for an irreplaceable material, predates the war and will outlast it.
For investors, the repricing has turned a sleepy commodity into one of the most closely watched trades of 2026, with some analysts debating whether tungsten could follow the kind of supercycle seen in other strategic metals. For policymakers, the lesson is harder and more uncomfortable: resilience has a cost, and a generation of offshoring left critical supply chains exposed to exactly the kind of pressure now playing out. The connection between commodity markets and national security, long treated as an afterthought, has moved to the center of the conversation. Our analysis of how the Iran war permanently reshaped energy and supply dynamics explores how durable these shifts are likely to be.
