By the end of this video, you will

understand exactly why the US wants

Greenland, how it connects to AI, China,

[music] and Silicon Valley. Stick

around. But before we start, this

episode is brought to you by Href's

marketing platform, and their feature

called Brand Raider, [music] which helps

businesses grow in the AI era. You know

how businesses are obsessed with Google

rankings and SEO, but have you actually

checked if your business is showing up

in Chad GBT or Perplexity or Gemini? Is

it being mentioned in YouTube summaries

or Reddit threads? And if it doesn't or

you're not sure how it shows up in the

AI search, it's a problem because the

search behavior has changed forever.

People use AI to research everything

these days, whether they want to work

with you, who to buy from, what to

invest in, and if you're not in those

results, you're invisible. Brand Raider

shows you exactly how your brand appears

across AI search engines, what people

are seeing when they ask about you, what

percentage of AI chats mention your

brand, find out what AI says about your

brand, and this is the key part, what

you need to fix to actually show up. You

can spot AI visibility gaps, see what

content is being picked up by AI, track

AI answers, and position your brand

around prompts instead of keywords. If

you're running a business or a brand and

want AI to know about you, check out

HREFs. And by the way, Brand Raider is

available to all free and paid ATFre

users. All right, let's get back into

the video. It's 1946.

World War II just ended. President

Truman receives a classified memo from

his Secretary of State with the subject

line, Greenland.

The memo is blunt. We need to buy it

from Denmark. For hund00 million, all

cash. The Cold War is starting. The

Arctic is the shortest route between the

US and Soviet missiles. [music] And

Greenland sits directly in the flight

path. Whoever controls Greenland

controls one of the most critical pieces

of the warning system for nuclear war.

Denmark says no. Fast forward 80 years.

President Trump. Same island, same

[music] interest. Except this time, it's

not so much about the missiles. It's

about this, the magnets. [music]

The magnets that cool AI data centers.

Because somewhere between Truman's cold

war and today's AI boom, [music] the US

outsourced the entire supply chain for

the thing that keeps these machines

running. And now China controls it,

almost all of it. The only problem is

that even if the US took Greenland

tomorrow, it most likely would not fix

the China problem at all. [music] Today

is about Greenland in the context of

tech and AI, rare earths, and the next

US China tech warfront.

Let's dive in.

What happens when you generate an AI

image or ask Gemini a question? Your

words are turned into vectors. that are

fed into a giant probability machine.

But what else? You're activating a

pretty complex supply chain. And this

supply chain involves rare earth

permanent magnets. A single chip uses

about.3 W hours. [music] A typical

Google search is roughly a thousand

times less. All of that extra energy

turns into heat inside a data center.

And this heat doesn't dissipate on its

own. Every watt of compute generates

heat that must be actively [music]

removed and that removal depends on the

cooling systems. The cooling systems are

packed with neodymium iron boron

magnets. And this is what they look

like. The magnets are used in cooling

fans and high density racks for rapid

thermal response for basically cooling.

[music]

And the problem is that these very

magnets that cool down data centers are

manufactured almost entirely

in China [music]

and they're sitting under Chinese expert

controls that tightened pretty

drastically just last year in December.

Modern AI depends on models, chips,

[music] and data centers. For a data

center to function when it's got power

dense GPUs, it [music] needs a massive

cooling and power stack. rare earths are

inside that stack at multiple layers

from cooling fans to pumps to storage to

transformers to generators. So when you

hear new AI data center project in

Texas, [music] you also have to

understand that that means that the

demand for the magnets is scaling as

well. So what does Greenland have to do

with these magnets, cooling systems, and

AI? Well, just about everything.

It is important to understand the

historical context here. In 1985, the

United States controlled approximately

60% of global rare earth production and

most of it came from Mountain Pass mine

in California's Mojave Desert. China, on

the other hand, produced about 30%. The

United States was the world leader in

rare earth mining, processing, [music]

and magnet manufacturing. They dominated

the entire vertical from [music] ore to

finished product. But then the tables

have turned. Throughout the '9s and

2000s, China poured a lot of state money

[music] into dirty rare earth processing

as well as the magnet plants that

western companies were happy to shut

down and offshore to China. [music]

So by the time anyone noticed, nearly

the entire supply chain had migrated to

China. [music]

Starting 2006, for nine years in a row,

China weaponized its control, they

restricted exports and cut supply by 40%

in 2010. And then during a maritime

dispute with Japan over a detained

fishing boat captain, they halted rare

earth shipments to Japan entirely for 2

months. Japanese manufacturer panicked

because Japan was 90% dependent on

Chinese imports at the time. The Japan

embargo was a watershed moment because

for the first time [music]

the world saw China willing to use rare

earth supply as a geopolitical weapon.

[music]

In turn, Japan aggressively diversified

and reduced Chinese dependence from 90%

[music] to 60%. And cut total rare earth

consumption in half. The 2010 China

Japan embargo was a wakeup call for

everyone. And in 2014, the World Trade

Organization ruled that China's export

quotas violated trade rules because

China couldn't justify them as

conservation or environmental

protection. China had to abolish formal

quotas, but they retained export

licensing and fully controlled

processing of rare earths. And 8 years

later, as you know, the magnet

dependency collided with the AI boom.

2022 OpenAI launches Chad GBT that

became as you all know the fastest

growing consumer technology in history

and that triggered the current AI

infrastructure buildout. The AI boom

created demand for data center capacity

that we have never seen before and that

is how the rare earths re-entered the

chat because AI workloads generate

vastly more heat than traditional

computing. Server racks jumped from 10

kows to 50 kowatts, some exceeding 100

kow, where every watt of compute

requires cooling. And modern cooling

systems, high efficiency fans, liquid

circulation pumps rely on neodymium iron

boron magnets. [music] And they do so

for their size and energy efficiency.

Meaning that on top of the existing

demand, we're looking for a ton more

magnets, which means a ton more

dependency on China. And once again, I

will remind you that 90% of these

magnets are produced and processed in

China. And if you're the US and you are

in direct confrontation with China,

you're going to want to deal with this

sooner rather than later. In the context

of AI and tech, the US needs Greenland

because the rare earth dominance matters

for the US. [music]

And it matters because the current

situation gives China leverage over the

physical hardware that AI runs on. You

may ask why Greenland? Greenland holds

1.5 million metric tons of rare earth

reserves which is enough to supply

meaningful share of the US demand and

reduce dependence on China. But

Greenland alone can't fix this problem

[music]

because the problem isn't in the mining.

The common narrative frames rare earths

as the mining problem, [music] but it's

not. China produces most of global rare

earth ore, but that's the least

important part of the equation. They own

around 70% of global mining and they

process around 90. Processing being the

operative word. There are several

reasons why Greenland cannot fix this

problem. Reason number one, the

processing mode is not solvable by land.

Think of it this way. the US or Europe

can design its own servers, can design

their own data centers. But if the

cooling fans or pumps use Chinese-made

magnets, they're exposed to Chinese

export licensing by definition. And

Chinese licensing is now the default.

Trump's logic goes like this. If we

control more rare earth ore, we're less

dependent on China. But the problem is

that the ore isn't the bottleneck. The

biggest moat is processing of the ore.

[music] If the United States acquired

Greenland tomorrow, it would solve

exactly 0% of the rare earth problem.

Because Greenland's deposits won't

produce significant ore for 10 plus

years. And even after mining starts, the

ore would still need Chinese processing,

the very dependency Greenland was meant

to fix. This is why the bottleneck is

the processing capacity. [music]

Processing being a very specialized

chemical engineering expertise. For

example, rare earth separation

chemistry, which is taught at maybe a

dozen universities globally, hazardous

acid processing, radioactive waste

handling, toxic waste handling. There's

about 2,000 tons of toxic waste per ton

of rare earths. Now, in the interest of

being fair, the US wouldn't be so

interested in Greenland if there was

nothing more to it than just the ore.

So, why does the US want it anyway?

[music] A ton of land. It's a ton of

physical location for data inensive tech

and data centers and subsequently free

cooling. On top of it, raiders,

satellite links, ground stations, space

awareness, early warning and missile

defense. As space becomes more

contested, permanent control of key

ground sites becomes more valuable. But

the paradox is that companies can

already build and lease in Greenland.

the ownership of the land, the ownership

of the country would only change the

political risk for Washington. So in

this equation for the US, this is a lot

less about technology or or minds

themselves. It's a lot more about the

nervous system of the western tech and

American defense. Reason number two, the

timeline is unachievable even under

extremely favorable assumptions. If

Greenland gets acquired or annexed in

2026, uranium ban repealed, full funding

secured, environmental permits

fasttracked, commercial scale rare earth

production [music] lies 7 to 10 years

into the future, and processing capacity

to refine that ore is another 3 to 5

years beyond mining. The US is

attempting to build this capacity, but

it's going to take another decade and

even then they'll process just a

fraction of the [music] Chinese

capacity. Meanwhile, AI infrastructure

deployment happens in quarters and it's

happening right now. Microsoft Stargate

project is underway now. [music]

OpenAI is openly talking about another

order of 10 gawatts of power for future

models which is roughly a New York Citys

sized grid just for one company and they

need it now. Data centers will consume

around a,000 terowatt hour by the end of

the year. Greenland [music]

can't solve a problem that manifests in

2025 with production [music] that starts

in 2023. And finally the recycling

problem.

The recycling problem is the elephant in

the room that gets a fraction of

attention compared to Greenland. In

April 2025, several companies, including

Microsoft, piloted a hard disk recycling

project and announced the successful

recovery of rare earths from

approximately 50,000 pounds of shredded

and decommissioned hard disk drives, as

well as mounting hardware collected from

Microsoft's data centers across the US.

The project recovered around 90% of the

rare earth materials, recaptured about

80% of the feed stock mask, including

gold, copper, aluminum, and steel, and

tested an acidfree recycling process

that can cut greenhouse gas emissions by

around 90% compared to traditional

mining. But ironically, rare earth

recycling rates sit below 10% in the US.

[music] And if this program were to

scale globally, recycling could return

significant volumes of recovered rare

earths to the US without requiring new

ore extraction or new territories. And

the chemistry of this process is very

straightforward compared to mining. The

magnets are already separated from ore

and already in purified metallic form.

But instead of thinking about recycling,

we're choosing to think about

acquisition of new territories.

Conclusion.

So, is buying Greenland worth it from a

tech perspective? It depends. Does

buying the country solve the magnet

bottleneck problem? No. But does it

provide control over Greenland's

long-term tech advantage, including

space? Yes. Is it worth a geopolitical

blast? Not so sure. Technologically,

Greenland is absolutely valuable as a

critical mineral province, as a

potential green AI hub, and as a space

node. But the methods matter. By 2025,

China dominates rare earth mining as

well as the entire supply chain. The

ore, the processing, the chemistry, the

magnets themselves. And you can't buy

your way out of that with a real estate

deal. We hope this was helpful. Let us

know what you think in the comments.

We'll see you next time.