President Trump and Mohammed bin Salman concluded the Saudi Crown Prince's visit to the U.S. today by speaking to more than 400 business leaders.

Beyond a defense agreement and talk of the kingdom's human rights record, the visit focused on joint U.S.-S.-Saudi ventures,

including extracting Saudi minerals critical to everything from fighter jets to cell phones and helping

Saudi Arabia build a civilian nuclear program. Nick Schifrin is here to discuss that now.

So Nick, let's begin with that deal over rare earth minerals. Why is that so important?

You just said it, Omna, these rare earth minerals and magnets that are produced by them go into everything

from electric vehicles to the world's

most advanced fighter jet, the F-35, and Saudi Arabia says that it has the fourth most valuable

deposit of rare earths in the world. But right now, China has a near monopoly on what are known as

heavy rare earths. They do 90% of the processing, and China produces 93% of all those earth magnets that are required for high-end manufacturing.

So the U.S. and Saudi Arabia have agreed that an American company, MP Materials, whose biggest shareholder right now is the U.S. government, in fact, will own just about half of a rare earth refinery

in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. and Saudi will mine and process the rare earths, and then that

will go to the U.S. Saudi and its allies in order to produce those magnets. In the long run,

the idea here is to reduce U.S., reduce Western reliance on China, because we saw China withhold

some of those rare earth magnets in the conversations with President Trump this year.

It also taps into something that Saudi officials say, that they are looking for the next big

oil giant like Aramco, and then it might be there in rare earth.

So take a listen to Graceland Bascaran

of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Saudi Arabia is absolutely emerging

as one of the biggest mineral superpowers.

What we see here is actually one of the biggest

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