The US Department of Energy has awarded US$73 million through its Mine of the Future initiative to four projects creating national-scale mining testbeds in West Virginia, Colorado, Arizona, Missouri and Texas. Innovative Wireless Technologies will integrate underground and surface sites in Julian, Blacksburg and Idaho Springs to validate next‑generation digital, connectivity and automation systems, while the University of Arizona and University of Missouri will build underground and comminution proving grounds focused on electrification and energy management. Southern Methodist University will repurpose a heavily instrumented Navasota drilling site into a “synthetic mine” for repeatable testing of drilling, sensing and autonomous workflows, aiming to de‑risk commercial deployment.

Mining projects dominate Prime Minister Mark Carney’s leaked C$1 trillion, five‑year investment pitchbook, with 63 of 167 opportunities spanning lithium, nickel, graphite, rare earths, gold and copper, and including proposals such as Canada’s first uranium refining and conversion plant in more than 40 years. Confirmed entries range from LithiumBank’s Boardwalk lithium brine project in Alberta, with 5.2 million measured and indicated tonnes LCE at 81.6 mg/L, to Surge Copper’s Berg copper‑molybdenum project, scoped for a 28‑year life and 176 million lb copper per year. Despite a 75% year‑on‑year rise to C$10.1 billion in TSX/TSXV mining equity raisings, pension and sovereign funds remain cautious on finite‑life mines, making long‑life assets and midstream processing plants more likely to secure capital.

Cyclic Materials has opened a 144,000-square-foot rare earth magnet recycling plant in Mesa, Arizona, designed to process up to 25,000 tonnes per year of magnet-bearing end-of-life products using its proprietary MagCycle mechanical separation technology. The feedstock-agnostic facility is already running at 8 tonnes per hour, producing Mag-Xtract rare earth magnet material and recovering copper, aluminium and steel for sale to US smelters, with over 7,000 tonnes of material already delivered. Backed by more than US$20 million in investment, the plant is intended as a replicable model ahead of a planned South Carolina rare earth recycling campus.