American Tungsten Corp. (TSXV: TUNG, OTCQB: DEMRF)
Building America’s Defense Critical Metals Supply
In 2026, a not-so-common metal on global commodity markets is rewriting records at a stunning pace — tungsten.
As of late April, spot prices for ammonium paratungstate (APT), a key tungsten intermediate product, at the Rotterdam port had surpassed 3,000 per metric tonne unit(MTU), up more than 200%. Some market quotations even reached $3,185, representing a nearly 900% surge over the past 12 months, far outpaced both gold and crude oil.
Tungsten — the metal with the highest melting point and a hardness rivaling diamond — is experiencing a super-cycle driven by a supply cliff and exploding demand.
Supply side: China tightens the tap, global market constricts
The core contradiction in the global tungsten market lies first and foremost on the supply side. China holds 53% of global reserves, controls about 80% of global tungsten mining output, and 70-85% of downstream processing including APT and tungsten carbide. However, since 2025, China has rolled out a series of export control measures: first an export licensing system, then sharp cuts to mining quotas, and by December 2025, a clear announcement that only 15 companies would be authorized to export tungsten products in 2026-2027.
The impact was immediate. According to Canaccord Genuity, China’s exports of key tungsten products effectively fell to zero in March 2025. For the full year, APT exports plunged from 782 tonnes the previous year to 243 tonnes, a drop of nearly 70%. In the first two months of 2026, export volumes were still down 27.6% year-on-year. At the same time, aging mines, falling ore grades and environmental crackdowns in China caused its own tungsten mining output to fall 10% year-on-year in 2025.
Demand side: Military drives growth, semiconductors and EVs take the baton
If supply contraction is the “push”, explosive demand growth is the “pull”. Tungsten is a core material for defence equipment such as armour-piercing ammunition, tank armour and missile guidance systems. According to Argus, defence currently accounts for about 12% of tungsten consumption and is growing at roughly 8% per year. Project Blue expects this share to rise to 15% by 2027-2028. Starting January 1, 2027, the United States will prohibit the procurement of tungsten products from China, Russia and other countries for military applications — just eight months away — yet the US currently has no active commercial tungsten mine in production.
In addition, tungsten hexafluoride (WF₆), used in semiconductor manufacturing, is a key material for advanced process nodes, with AI data centre demand expected to double by 2030. Electric vehicles require about 2kg of tungsten each for gearing systems, battery anodes and other components, while EU pure EV registrations jumped 48.9% year-on-year in March. Even the mining sector itself — tungsten is an essential consumable for drilling and excavation equipment — is benefiting from rising prices for other metals.
George Heppel, vice president of commodity research at BMO Capital Markets, said: “In my 12 years working across the commodity space and dealing with a lot of weird and wonderful metals, I have never seen a market as tight as tungsten is right now. This isn’t like lithium — there was a huge pipeline of projects that could come online for lithium. There isn’t for tungsten.”
Structural deficit: Non-China projects cannot quench near-term thirst
Canaccord Genuity’s research points out that with limited new project pipelines and global tungsten demand expected to grow 47% by 2035, the tungsten market will remain in a long-term structural deficit.
Supply additions outside China are few: South Korea’s Almonty Sangdong mine started production in March and is expected to contribute 2,300 tonnes in 2026; Kazakhstan’s Severniy Katpar deposit, backed by $900 million in financing from the US Export-Import Bank, faces a lengthy development timeline; the Ima project in Idaho, US, has just broken ground; the restart of the Hemerdon mine in the UK remains uncertain.
All of this means that even if China were to lift all export restrictions tomorrow, the gap between its own declining output and growing global demand has already become unbridgeable.
Conclusion
It is clear that the sharp rise in tungsten prices is not a short-term speculative move, but the result of three forces: highly concentrated supply, rigid demand growth — especially driven by defence security — and an extreme lag in new project development.
Tungsten has now transformed from an obscure industrial additive into a litmus test for the resilience of critical mineral supply chains in Western countries. For investors, understanding the tungsten market is no longer a matter of analysing supply-demand balance sheets, but rather a strategic question of assessing global geopolitical dynamics and the trajectory of rearmament cycles. In this new resource game, whoever controls tungsten holds the key to advanced manufacturing and national defence security.
