China controls 80% of an exotic metal America needs for every cruise missile and armor-piercing round — and its price has surged 8x since 2025

The Dolphin Mine first opened in 1917 for World War I, according to Bloomberg. It shut down, then restarted for World War II in 1938. Then it came back again for Korea. And again for Vietnam. Each time, global conflict seemed to pull it out of dormancy. In 1990, a year after the Berlin Wall fell, the mine closed — seemingly for good. Its tunnels filled with water, and the small town built around it slowly emptied out.

Then, this January, it stirred again.

“The phone started ringing in January, and it hasn’t stopped ringing,” Group 6 Metals Executive Chairman Kevin Pallas — whose company reopened Dolphin in 2023 — told Bloomberg. “The majority of the early calls we got were people saying: ‘We thought you were dead.’”

What’s drawing investors back to this island is tungsten — and more specifically, a price that has spiked. The metal now costs almost eight times what it did at the start of 2025.

That kind of spike would get attention on its own. The bigger issue is that nearly 80% of the world’s tungsten supply comes from China. When that much of a critical material sits in one country, even small shifts in export policy become everyone’s problem.

Why one obscure metal has Washington nervous

Tungsten is about as dense as gold and has the highest melting point of any metal. That’s why it hardens the cores of armor-piercing rounds and goes into missile warheads and other munitions — a single missile or anti-tank round can carry several kilograms of it. It’s also in mining drills, cutting tools, semiconductors, and even fishing weights.

China digs up nearly 80% of the world’s mined tungsten — 67,000 of the 85,000 metric tons produced in 2025, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The U.S., on the other hand, hasn’t mined tungsten commercially since 2015, so it now has to import it, even though tungsten is a key ingredient in both modern weapons and everyday manufacturing.

Then China started reining in its tungsten exports.

In February 2025, it put export controls on several tungsten products, a few months after the U.S. had slapped a 50% tariff on Chinese tungsten. In December, Beijing went further and named just 15 companies allowed to export the metal in 2026 and 2027, giving it direct control over how much leaves the country and who gets it.

All of this happened while the West was using up huge amounts of tungsten-heavy ammunition in Ukraine and the Iran war, trying to rebuild its weapons stockpiles.

A price chart that looks like a launch

The benchmark here is ammonium paratungstate (APT) — the traded chemical most tungsten products start out as. At the start of 2025, it sold for about $331 per metric ton unit. Then export curbs and stockpiling kicked in. The price roughly doubled over 2025, then kept climbing in 2026, from about $900 in January to nearly $1,900 by mid-February.

All in, APT is now almost eight times what it was at the beginning of 2025.

To put that in perspective, over the past year, tungsten outran both gold and oil — two assets that had a very good year themselves.

Where this reaches your wallet

You’re not going to buy tungsten. But the squeeze still reaches you in some ways.

The first is prices. Tungsten is in the tools that cut, drill and machine almost everything that gets manufactured — and in the chips inside your electronics. When a core industrial input jumps nearly eightfold, some of that shock eventually leaks into the cost of the things it helps produce.