The $20 Trillion Rock: Why the US and China Are Fighting Over the Deep Sea

Five kilometers under the Pacific, in pitch-black water cold enough and heavy enough to crush a submarine, lie fields of ugly black rocks that Think School says are worth $20 trillion. According to the video, these unremarkable nodules — not space, not oil — are what's quietly escalating tensions between the United States and China. This is the story of the four metals inside them, how China cornered the world's supply, and why Donald Trump broke international law to go after the seabed.

This post condenses the Think School video. The figures, forecasts, and framing are the creator's.

From Steel and Oil to Four Metals

The video's central premise is that the commodities of power have changed. In the 20th century, it argues, two things decided whether a nation was strong or weak: steel and oil. It borrows a line Thomas Carlyle reportedly delivered in a lecture attended by Jamsetji Tata — "the nation that understands the worth of steel will reap its worth in gold" — to make the point that raw materials, not gold or diamonds, have always underwritten national power.

Today, the video says, that mantle has passed to four metals: manganese, cobalt, nickel and copper. It calls them the "infinity stones" of 21st-century geopolitics because they sit beneath the five attributes it defines as national power — military strength, industrial base, energy and infrastructure, technology and innovation, and self-reliance. Can you defend yourself, manufacture what matters, generate and move power, build the chips to compute, and do all of it without asking another country's permission? In the video's telling, these four metals are the answer to every one of those questions.

Copper: The Nervous System That's Running Out

The video's most urgent warning is about copper. As the world electrifies — petrol cars becoming electric, homes, factories and data centers all drawing more current — it needs a metal that conducts electricity efficiently without corroding. That metal is copper, the third most-used industrial metal on Earth. The chain of dependence it draws is blunt: no copper means no grid, no power, no factories, no data centers, and eventually no AI and no cities.

And here, the video says, is the problem: after 10,000 years of mining, the world is running short. It cites demand of 27 million tons of refined copper in 2024, rising to 33 million by 2035 and 37 million by 2050. Supply, meanwhile, was about 22.8 million tons mined in 2024, is expected to peak in the late 2020s at just over 24 million tons, and then fall below 19 million tons by 2035. Even if every planned mine gets built, the video claims that pipeline covers only about 70% of demand — and because a new copper mine can take 10 to 20 years to go from discovery to production, it argues the world is "practically staring at a copper crisis."

Manganese, Nickel and Cobalt: The Industrial Backbone

The other three metals map onto industry and technology. Around 90% of manganese, the video says, goes into steel, and there is no substitute — it removes the oxygen and sulfur that would otherwise make steel brittle, so you physically cannot make modern steel without it. No manganese, no steel, no infrastructure.

Nickel and cobalt round out the set. About 65% of the world's nickel goes into stainless steel — the rust-free material behind surgical instruments, chemical plants and oil refineries — while cobalt is described as one of the most important safety metals in an EV battery, keeping it stable and preventing overheating. Crucially, the video is careful to say we are not actually running out of these three: there's enough to run the world for the next 50 years. The problem is who controls them.

China's Quiet Chokehold

This is where the video turns from geology to geopolitics. It lays out a striking picture of Chinese dominance across the supply chain. The Democratic Republic of Congo, it says, holds about 76% of the world's cobalt — more than the rest of the world combined — and China has bought 50% of its mines. In 2024, 60% of nickel came from Indonesia, of which China controls roughly 75% directly or indirectly. Nearly half the world's copper is refined in or through China, via smelters, ownership or investment.

Manganese is the cleverest piece, according to the video: China neither owns the mines nor depends on one country. Instead it dominates the alloys that steelmaking requires — producing about 67% of silicomanganese and roughly 35% of high-carbon ferromanganese — controlling steel production without controlling the ore. And the timing, the video argues, is the masterstroke: China began this around 2008, in the depths of the global recession, and kept accumulating through COVID and the Russia-Ukraine war. While the rest of the world was consumed by crisis from 2008 to 2026, it says, China collected all four infinity stones.

The Illegal Treasure and the Loophole

The video says the chokehold has left rivals desperate enough that Elon Musk and NASA have seriously examined mining asteroids — but at a cited $9.5 million per gram, that's a non-starter. Which brings everything back to the Pacific, where a single patch between Hawaii and Mexico holds 21.1 billion tons of metal-rich nodules valued at $20 trillion, with enough of the four metals to run the world for 50 years.

The catch is that it's illegal to mine. Under the 1982 Law of the Sea, signed by more than 100 countries, the deep seabed belongs to no one and is governed by the International Seabed Authority; a licensee keeps 50% of an explored area, and 50% is reserved for developing nations. The video alleges China exploited this: a Chinese company surveyed 148,000 km², kept half and "donated" the other half for developing countries — and then, because China officially classifies as a developing nation at the UN, a Chinese state metals corporation signed a contract to mine 72,000 km² of exactly those reserved areas. Donating with one hand, it says, and withdrawing with the other.

History's Warning

That loophole, the video argues, is why Trump got angry — breaking international law to let American companies mine the same seabed, and igniting a silent war between two powers that don't trust each other. The video ends on a historical pattern it finds ominous: the 1884 Berlin Conference peacefully carved up Africa's resources on paper, then World War I followed thirty years later; treaties calling outer space "the province of all mankind" didn't prevent a 45-year Cold War or the near-nuclear crisis of October 1962. Every time, it says, there's a future-defining resource, two distrustful powers, and a treaty of beautiful words. Oil gave us the World Wars; uranium gave us the Cold War. So, the video asks, what will a black rock five kilometers under the Pacific give us?

Conclusion

Whether or not the deep sea ever becomes a battlefield, Think School's argument is that the raw materials of the future are already being fought over — and that control of the supply chain, not the size of the reserves, is what makes a nation powerful in 2026. It's a provocative frame, and the video leaves the ending deliberately open. Watch the original for the full case.

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Originally published on Think School. Watch the full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tSj2A_Pqfo