The quantum race is usually told in qubit counts and error rates. A 2025 Stanford GTG white paper by Min-Ha Lee, Andrew J. Grotto, and Mauritz Kop tells it as a story about minerals: the critical raw materials that every major quantum-computing hardware modality requires, and the short list of countries that control them.
Which materials every qubit technology needs
Strontium and ytterbium for neutral atoms, niobium for superconducting circuits, indium for bump-bonds, tantalum for oscillators, and helium-3 for the dilution refrigerators that cool it all to millikelvin temperatures. Every qubit modality carries its own mineral bill, and many inputs have supplier geographies measured in a handful of countries. About 90 percent of niobium is mined in Brazil alone, and China dominates both the mining and the processing of the rare-earth elements that quantum lasers, magnets, and optics consume. Add isotopically enriched silicon-28 and specialty photonics, and the bill of materials reads like a stress test of globalization.
How the authors score the choke points
The paper's contribution is a sector-specific risk methodology: score each material on supply-chain vulnerability, exploitability, and strategic impact, instead of relying on cross-sectoral national lists that blur what quantum computing needs. The exercise confirms the rare earths as critical and elevates a sleeper, high-purity molybdenum, which the report identifies as an under-examined enabler in the device and substrate supply chain. It is the same strategic terrain mapped in An LSI Test for Securing the Quantum Industrial Commons, now extended to the mineral layer.
Why China's 2024 and 2025 export controls make this urgent
The risk is already active. Building on its 2023 gallium and germanium controls and its 2024 antimony controls, Beijing tightened export controls in December 2024 and extended them in 2025 to bismuth, indium, molybdenum, tellurium, tungsten, and heavy rare earths, and prices for several of them spiked. The authors' warning cuts both ways: concentrated supply invites coercion, and unilateral controls invite self-sufficiency drives that fracture the very supply chains they aim to protect. Multilateral coordination, stockpiling, recycling, and diversified sourcing work best before an industry scales, and quantum is still, briefly, at that stage.
The full post walks through the methodology, the materials inventory, the 2024 and 2025 control wave, the follow-on Quantum Criticality Index research agenda, and why supply-chain concentration is becoming a standard due-diligence question for technology counsel.
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