Whenever Europe falls behind in a strategic technology, the diagnosis defaults to the same cause: excessive regulation and insufficient risk appetite. Regulation can and should be simplified. But that is not the binding constraint holding back European critical materials supply chains. The real problem is the failure to turn world-class science into industrial scale — and the specific mechanism missing is aggregated, committed demand that turns potential buyers into anchor customers.
Writing in the context of the EIT RawMaterials Summit 2026, Victor Mulas identifies a structural gap that is both precise and actionable. Europe produces serious research, capable entrepreneurs, promising companies and sophisticated industrial buyers. What it lacks is the coordination infrastructure that converts those ingredients into industries.
What Japan does differently
The contrast with Japan is instructive. Several European players in critical materials recycling are reaching commercial scale — HyProMag has opened a magnet-recycling plant in Germany, and Carester’s CareMag is building one of Europe’s first large-scale rare earth recycling and refining facilities in France. But each company assembled the missing commercial piece on its own: Carester through a ten-year Stellantis offtake agreement and Japanese state and industrial backing; HyProMag through individual industrial buyer relationships. The science was not the binding constraint. Bankable demand was — and in Europe, a company still secures it deal by deal.
Japan, through JOGMEC and METI, does more of the orchestrating that Europe leaves to private initiative: equity, loans and guarantees the private sector will not provide alone, strategic stockpiles, recycling targets, and consortia that align buyers, researchers and processing capacity before projects need to stand on their own. The technology gap between Europe and Japan is small. The commercialisation gap is considerably larger.
Lessons from Warp Speed and NASA
The constraint for European startups is rarely the science. It is reaching scale at the speed the challenge demands. Neither Europe nor Japan can match American scale-up capital — but what both can do is manufacture scale on the demand side by committing to buy a solution before it exists. When NASA needed cargo delivered to the International Space Station, it did not build the vehicle itself; it part-funded development and bought delivery as a service. That combination drew in private capital and built the commercial launch industry that now leads the world. Operation Warp Speed applied the same logic to vaccines.
Europe is beginning to build this instrument through the Raw Materials Mechanism, and proposals for a JOGMEC-style Critical Raw Materials Centre point in the same direction. But current tools remain too close to voluntary matchmaking. What is needed are two more forceful applications: EU-aggregated pre-purchase, pooling member states behind a clearly specified solution that does not yet exist; and the coordinated buying power of Europe’s large global companies, whose balance sheets and demand volumes can call a market into being.
Guaranteed demand will not immediately make European critical materials supply cheaper than China’s. But that gap should not be treated as an inefficient subsidy. It should be treated as a strategic autonomy premium — the price of resilience against geopolitical shocks, export controls and supply disruption. Paid upfront, it buys the volume and time to drive costs down to competitive levels, through procurement rather than deregulation.
Cluster or fall behind
Europe has the ingredients: research, talent, corporations and procurement budgets. What it lacks is the connective infrastructure that turns them into industries — aggregated demand, patient capital to bridge the gap from pilot to plant, and institutions accountable for carrying named ventures to a first commercial contract. Europe funds many clusters and hubs; what it rarely runs is a programme with accountability for specific commercial outcomes. Without it, results come too slowly and at too small a scale.
The opportunity grows with connection to like-minded economies facing the same vulnerabilities — Japan, South Korea, the UK, Canada and Australia. Linking European innovators to these ecosystems can open access to buyers, capital and expertise that no single region can reach alone. The technologies that will define strategic autonomy in this decade are already in European laboratories. The science is there, and so is the ambition. What is needed is the orchestration to turn them into industrial outcomes.
