The world's largest lithium producer by volume, US-listed Albemarle operates brine and hard-rock assets across Chile, Australia, and the United States that form the backbone of Western EV battery supply.
Chile's dominant lithium brine producer and the world's second-largest, SQM operates the Salar de Atacama under a 2023 state JV transferring control to Codelco by 2031.
full dossier ›Chile holds the world's largest lithium reserves in the Atacama Desert; its 2023 state-majority nationalization model, pairing Codelco with SQM, defines the global critical-minerals sovereignty debate.
Producers and processors: the fifteen miners and refiners who set the critical minerals supply floor
From Chilean brine fields to Congolese copper pits, fifteen companies mine and refine the lithium, copper and cobalt the energy transition depends on.
The lightest solid metal and core material in EV and grid-storage batteries; China refines roughly 70% of global output, making lithium the central critical-mineral security flashpoint of the energy transition.
China's Tianqi Lithium holds 51% of the world's largest hard-rock lithium mine and 23.77% of Chilean SQM, a structural swing factor in global battery supply chains.
Q1 2026 lithium revenue of $1.76B beat consensus on a 69.8% YoY gain; average realised price recovered to $18/kg from $10/kg in Q4 2025; Tianqi sold 1.25% in February as SQM upgraded 2026 volume guidance to 15%+ growth