Tungsten miner Almonty weighs deal as US seeks critical-metal supply
By James Attwood / Bloomberg
09 Sep 2025, 12:02 am
Nasdaq-listed Canadian firm Almonty Industries Inc is considering buying a US tungsten asset to boost its US presence by helping America reduce its reliance on China for a niche metal.
(Sept 9): Almonty Industries Inc is considering buying a US tungsten asset in a bid to join America’s push to reduce its reliance on China for a niche metal that’s crucial to weapons manufacturing.
The possible acquisition is the Toronto-based firm’s latest effort to boost its US presence after listing shares on the Nasdaq in July and announcing plans to re-domicile to Delaware. It’s also holding supply talks with the Department of Defense, chief executive officer Lewis Black said on Friday.
He spoke in an interview on the same day President Donald Trump moved to exempt tungsten from his country-based tariffs given that the US ceased commercial production a decade ago. The US is keen to revitalise local supplies of the super-dense material, which is used in armour-piercing munitions, in states like Idaho and Nevada as part of a broader push for critical-mineral independence.
Almonty sees the possible purchase of an existing asset in the US — rather than an undeveloped deposit — as a good complement to its large-scale project in South Korea, which is about to start producing, and a smaller mine in Portugal, Black said. He didn’t name the asset or the location.
“There’s something I like in the US because it’s in the US, plus I really like the state,” he said. “It’s a nice size, not big. It’s not like Korea. But we can utilise a lot of our components we have in Spain at a plant there.”
The firm’s shares have quadrupled in the past year as trade tensions stoke tungsten supply concerns. The stock jumped as much as 7.5% in New York on Monday, leading gains among peers.
Besides the prospective asset purchase, Almonty has also been in discussions for the past several months with US agencies, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, Black said.
Rather than seeking funding or the kind of deal that the Pentagon did recently to take a stake in rare-earths producer MP Materials Corp, Almonty is proposing state purchases of tungsten using a free-market price.
“We certainly had dialog around the concept of transparent material being available on a longer-term basis,” Black said. “Now I’ll be back on the stagecoach down to Washington to essentially continue these conversations of how this is crafted.”
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