Mexico Doesn’t Need to Be Rare to Be Critical in North America

The reclassification began to have policy implications just a few months after it was announced. In February 2026, Mexico and the United States agreed on an action plan to identify critical minerals of mutual interest and coordinate policies aimed at strengthening their supply chains. The measures under consideration even include exploring border-adjusted price floors for certain minerals, with the possibility of later incorporating them into a binding plurilateral agreement.

The rapprochement comes as Washington seeks to reduce vulnerabilities in supply chains it considers essential to its industry and defense. For Mexico, the discussion takes on a different dimension: it is not simply whether it possesses minerals the United States considers strategic, but how much of that potential can be converted into production and connected to the two countries’ industrial supply chains.

Mining currently accounts for about 3.3% of Mexico’s GDP and supplies 123 branches of the economy³. That presence is also visible in the industrial real estate market: companies classified by SiiLA under mining, metallurgy and steel occupied about 3.43 million square meters as of the second quarter of 2026, equivalent to 3.4% of occupied industrial gross leasable area in the country’s main northern, central and Bajío markets.

However, greater mining activity does not necessarily translate into greater industrial space occupancy. Between 2020 and 2026, a 1% increase in mining GDP was associated, on average, with about 0.17% growth in the space occupied by companies in the sector one year later⁴. For the mining sector, this reflects how activity can grow without a proportional expansion in the industrial space its companies occupy.

Whether that relationship changes will depend, in part, on what happens to projects currently outside the operational stage. Of the 988 projects linked to minerals the United States considers critical, 892 are in other stages, with many still in earlier phases. Among them, 255 are in exploration, 189 in target definition, 155 correspond to initial prospect areas and 101 are in reserve development.

Mexico’s mineral resources are therefore not yet translating into new production capacity, and what happens to those projects will determine how much value stays underground and how much makes it out. The opportunity may lie not only in extracting more minerals, but in moving them through more of their value chain before leaving Mexico, so cooperation with the United States supports not only primary production but also downstream processing, transformation and manufacturing. A longer value chain within Mexico could, in turn, reshape the location dynamics of some investments by bringing new capacity closer to places where minerals, infrastructure, energy and market access converge, allowing the value beneath the surface to expand its footprint above ground as well.

Want access to more information and sector analysis on Mexico’s industrial market? Visit SiiLA Market Analytics or email us at contacto@siila.com.mx.

¹ The 10 minerals added to the 2025 list compared with the 2022 list were boron, copper, lead, metallurgical coal, phosphate, potash, rhenium, silicon, silver and uranium. Source: U.S. Geological Survey.

² SiiLA analysis based on information from the Sistema Integral sobre Economía Minera (SINEM), Dirección General de Desarrollo Minero, and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), 2025 List of Critical Minerals. Projects were considered associated with critical minerals if they reported at least one mineral included on the USGS list. For projects in operation, the stage reported as “Operando” in SINEM was additionally used.

³ SiiLA calculation based on INEGI, quarterly Gross Domestic Product by economic activity, seasonally adjusted series at 2018 prices, Q2 2026; and CIDE-CAMIMEX, Relevancia del sector minero mexicano en el desarrollo económico nacional (2025).

⁴ SiiLA analysis based on quarterly information from INEGI and SiiLA for the period Q3 2020 – Q2 2026. For economic activity, INEGI’s seasonally adjusted Mining GDP series, expressed at constant 2018 prices, was used. For the real estate market, occupied GLA for companies classified by SiiLA under Mining, Metallurgy and Steel was used across eight industrial markets with comparable information throughout the period: Aguascalientes, Mexico City, Ciudad Juárez, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí and Tijuana. The series were standardized to quarterly frequency, and the analysis used first logarithmic differences rather than levels, given mixed evidence from ADF and KPSS stationarity tests. Contemporaneous relationships and lags of one to four quarters were estimated using linear regressions. The four-quarter association produced a coefficient of 0.172 with Newey-West robust standard errors (95% CI: 0.030–0.315; p=0.020); lags of zero to three quarters were not statistically significant. Additional tests were conducted using HC3 errors and different Newey-West specifications, as well as distributed-lag and reverse-direction models. Given the small sample size, the evaluation of multiple lags without correction for multiple comparisons and the sensitivity of some specifications, the result is interpreted as an exploratory statistical association within the period analyzed and not as evidence of causality.