Why Defense Programs Are Moving Off Chinese Tungsten

Defense programs are moving off Chinese tungsten because China is actively closing the door on the other side, not only because a regulation is telling U.S. buyers to leave. In the last year China cut its own list of authorized tungsten exporters down to 15 companies, banned a category of military-relevant tungsten exports to Japan outright, and watched prices more than triple in response. A supply a defense program depends on is not supposed to work that way, and that is the whole reason the shift is happening now rather than waiting for the DFARS deadline to force it.

China tightened its own grip before the U.S. tightened the rule

On December 26, 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce cut the number of companies authorized to export tungsten to just 15 for 2026 through 2027. That is not a tariff or a quota on an open market. It is a whitelist: if a buyer’s supplier is not one of those 15 names, there is no tungsten to buy from them, full stop.

Less than two weeks later, on January 6, 2026, China went further and banned exports of specific dual-use tungsten items, ammonium paratungstate, tungsten oxide, and tungsten carbide, to Japan when the end use is military or enhances military capability. Market data backs up how fast that tightened the tap: tungsten APT exports fell from 782 tonnes in 2024 to 243 tonnes across January through November 2025, a 70% drop, according to Fastmarkets.

Neither move targeted the United States by name. Both moves are exactly the kind of unilateral, on-again-off-again control that makes building a defense program around Chinese tungsten a standing risk rather than a settled cost.

What that did to price

Tungsten ammonium paratungstate started 2025 at $331 per metric ton unit. By the end of that year it had climbed to $675, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. By January 7, 2026, Fastmarkets had it at $1,090 to $1,150, more than triple where it started twelve months earlier and still climbing.

That is not a gradual, plannable cost increase. It is the price behavior of a market where the dominant supplier, China mined roughly 79% of the world’s tungsten in 2025, can move the whitelist or the export category and change what a program pays with a few weeks’ notice.

The regulatory side is moving in parallel, not instead

DFARS 252.225-7052 is the other half of this, and it is worth being precise about the difference. China’s export moves are why the material itself is getting harder and more expensive to source from a covered country. The DFARS clause, which widens from testing where tungsten was melted to testing where it was mined starting January 1, 2027, is why a defense contractor cannot simply route around China’s restrictions by buying from a reseller and calling it clean. We covered exactly how to verify that in a prior post on domestic tungsten sourcing; this one is about why the pressure to make that switch is real and current, not hypothetical.

Where the alternative supply is actually coming from

Money is already moving into non-Chinese tungsten, and it is traceable to specific projects, not a vague policy intention.

• Pilot Mountain, Nevada. On July 22, 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded $6.2 million under Title III of the Defense Production Act to Golden Metal Resources, a Guardian Metal Resources subsidiary, to advance a pre-feasibility study for the Pilot Mountain tungsten project.
• Kazakhstan. In October 2025 a joint venture between Kazakhstan and the United States was announced specifically to develop tungsten resources outside China, per USGS reporting.
• The National Defense Stockpile. For fiscal year 2025 the stockpile listed potential tungsten acquisitions of 2,041 metric tons and zero planned disposals. The government is building a reserve, not drawing one down, which is not something you do for a material you consider low-risk.

None of these replace China’s output at scale yet. World tungsten mine production outside China was still only about 20% of the total as of the most recent USGS data. What they show is direction: capital and federal funding both moving toward non-Chinese tungsten at the same time China is restricting who can sell it, which is a faster-moving story than the 2027 compliance deadline alone would suggest.

What this means for a program buying tungsten right now

The practical read is simple even though the politics are not. If your tungsten traces back to one of China’s 15 authorized exporters, or to a melt that sourced ore through one of them, that supply is now sitting inside a system China can tighten again on a few weeks’ notice, independent of anything DFARS requires. Programs that have already moved to domestic melt and, where possible, domestic ore are the ones not exposed to that decision the next time China makes one.

The same density-driven substitution logic shows up outside tungsten heavy alloy parts too. Our sister brand USA Tungsten’s bucking bars for aerospace and airframe riveting serve the same fatigue-critical, defense-adjacent shops that are asking this sourcing question about every tungsten component on their floor, not just the ones stamped for a specific program.

Tungsten Parts Wyoming manufactures tungsten and tungsten heavy alloy components powder to finished part in Laramie, Wyoming, under AS9100D and ISO 9001. For the verification checklist on your own supply chain, see our post on domestic tungsten sourcing.