Erbium and yttrium: China's rare earth squeeze threatens fiber networks and turbines

A November deadline

Discussions of rare earth shortages usually focus on the four elements behind high-strength permanent magnets: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium. But according to IEEE Spectrum, two of the quieter members of the 17-element family, erbium and yttrium, now sit at the center of a supply squeeze with a geopolitical deadline attached. China, which dominates both markets almost completely, is expected to decide in November whether to extend or remove suspensions on export restrictions it placed on twelve rare earth elements in 2025.

Near-total Chinese control

China mines roughly 90 percent of the world's yttrium and processes essentially all mined ore into industrially usable forms such as yttrium oxide, IEEE Spectrum reports. Erbium is even more concentrated. Eric Bender, vice president of strategy and corporate development at mining and chemicals firm Tronox, told the outlet he is not aware of anyone outside China producing erbium oxide at commercial scale.

Export controls introduced in April and October 2025 cover twelve rare earths, including both elements. Some restrictions, including those on erbium but not yttrium, were suspended for one year in November 2025. Yttrium exports instead became erratic and sharply reduced: China approved a single 60-tonne shipment of yttrium oxide to the United States in March 2026 and a 10-tonne shipment in April. Overall, yttrium shipments to the U.S. are down around 75 percent this year compared with 2025.

Turbines and data centers

Yttrium's most consequential use is yttria-stabilized zirconia, a thermal barrier coating that protects turbine blades in jet engines and combustion turbines. Demand for combustion turbines in the U.S. is at an all-time high, driven largely by the need to power new data centers, including hyperscale AI facilities. Riston Rocchio-Heller, an engineer and lab manager at Oerlikon Metco, one of the few producers of the coating and the equipment that applies it, said erratic yttrium availability has "thrown us upside down" over the past year. Alternatives exist, he noted, but the yttrium-based version remains the industry standard, and replacement research is unlikely to bear fruit soon.

GE Vernova, one of the world's largest turbine manufacturers, said at an investor day in December that it had enough yttrium to last into 2026, though CEO Scott Strazik did not specify how far into the year, according to IEEE Spectrum. Yttrium also appears in white LEDs, displays, microwave filters and solid-state lasers, and as rare-earths consultant Thomas Kruemmer put it, small quantities feed into the trillions of multilayer ceramic capacitors that keep modern electronics, including AI data centers, running.

Why erbium has no substitute

Erbium's critical role is in erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, installed along long-haul fiber-optic cables, typically every 80 to 120 kilometers on land and every 50 to 80 kilometers undersea. Each amplifier contains a 10-to-30-meter length of doped fiber pumped with laser light, causing erbium atoms to re-emit photons at exactly 1,550 nanometers, the wavelength window where silica fiber loses the least signal. As IEEE Spectrum explains, nothing but erbium naturally re-radiates at that wavelength. Engineers are also fitting the amplifiers into free-space optical links between low-Earth-orbit satellites such as Starlink, largely to reuse the large existing industrial base for 1550-nm hardware, according to Michel Corriveau of MPB Communications, a leading amplifier provider.

Little movement outside China

Despite the approaching deadline, IEEE Spectrum found little evidence that U.S. or European governments are preparing for a cutoff of either element. "Very few folks outside of China are talking yet about 'How do we produce erbium, how do we produce yttrium?'" said Gareth Hatch, managing director of Strategic Minerals Advisory. The U.S. does hold both in the National Defense Stockpile managed by the Defense Logistics Agency, which does not disclose its contents, and the Trump administration announced a $12 billion public-private initiative in February 2026.

Why it matters

The rare earth story is usually told through electric vehicles and wind turbines, but erbium and yttrium sit behind the internet's physical backbone and the turbines generating power for new data centers. If China lets the suspended restrictions snap back in November, fiber amplifiers, combustion turbine production and the ceramic capacitors inside nearly every electronic device would all face a chokepoint with essentially no commercial-scale processing outside one country and no near-term substitutes. The decision will shape tech supply chains and the wider U.S.-China trade relationship alike.