All right, Brian, thanks so much.

Welcome to closing bell. I'm Scott Wobner, live from Post 9, here at the New York Stock Exchange. This make-a-break hour begins with the U.S. versus China on two major fronts today. A deal for NVIDIA and AMD to sell chips there, but with a catch. And one company trying to shake up the market for rare earths, and the big backer behind those efforts. We'll get to both in just a moment.

We'll show you the scorecard first with 60 to go in regulation today. It has, as Brian said,

been a tight range for stocks most of the day to day as investors await tomorrow's CPI data.

You see the majors here not doing all that much. Sectors are pretty split as well. Discretionary

is leading, materials lagging,

and speaking of materials, it does take us to our talk of the tape today, the race for rare earths,

in high demand for things like drones and EVs, but a market all but cornered by the Chinese.

Not if one American company gets its way. Vulcan Elements announcing a $65 million fundraise today,

led by Altimiter's Brad Gersner. John Maslin is that company's CEO and co-founder. He does

join us now. We're so pleased to have you. Welcome and congratulations on this raise.

Thanks for having me. Led by Altimeter, as I said, how'd that relationship come to be?

We've had conversations for several months.

Brad Gersner, Eric Kriesman at the company.

They understand hardware.

They understand deep tech.

And we're really excited to have them as our partner as we get ready to scale this company up.

What do you do with the cash?

Tell me about your, your scaling ideas.

So what we're going to do is we are going to go and build our commercial facility with several

hundred tons online over the next couple of years and several thousand tons by the end of this

decade. Can you build, I mean, we are essentially talking about building a U.S. industry from scratch? Are we not? And can you do that in

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