On a hostile, sand-blasted planet at the edge of an imperial frontier, a harvester the size of a small town crawls across the desert floor.

Beneath the orange sand, a vital substance is forming that the rest of the universe cannot live without. It powers the trading vessels of the Spacing Guild. It extends the lives of the great nobles. It sharpens the minds of the mystics who advise emperors.

The planet is Arrakis. The substance is spice. And the entire architecture of an interstellar civilization rises and falls on its flow.

This is the mesmerizing world Frank Herbert built in his 1965 novel, Dune.

And at the centre of his universe sits a powerful refrain – a mantra:

The spice must flow.

That’s the cold, immovable law that governs every decision made by every faction in Herbert's universe.

Houses might rise and fall, emperors might be murdered in their beds, whole planets might burn – but the spice, the lifeblood of civilization, had to keep flowing, or everything stopped.

Every great empire in human history has been organized around a single irreplaceable substance, and the geographic chokepoint where that substance emerged.

Egypt had grain from the floodplain of the Nile. Venice had spices from the Indies. Spain had silver from a mountain in the Andes. Britain had gold in vaults beneath London. And America had oil in the salt caverns of the Gulf Coast.

Each critical substance defined an era. And each era ended when the substance was supplanted by another.

In 2026, the substance around which world trade, politics and order is structured is being replaced again.

The New Spice

The lifeblood of the twenty-first-century empire is no longer petroleum. It is silicon, lithium, gallium, germanium, cobalt, and the 17 rare-earth metals without which not a single advanced semiconductor can be built.

These are the AI-critical materials that power artificial intelligence, modern defence, electric mobility, communications, and the entirety of the post-industrial economy.

Vladimir Putin understood the stakes years long before any American president. In 2017, addressing Russian schoolchildren on the subject of artificial intelligence, the Russian leader said "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world."

It was a near-perfect echo of a line spoken sixty years earlier by a different Vladimir – Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, the cunning antagonist of Dune – who said, "He who controls the spice controls the universe."

These materials – essential to the multi-trillion-dollar scaling of AI – are the new spice.

And the world's two great superpowers are locked in battle to control them.

China controls 98% of global gallium production, roughly 70% of the world's silver refining capacity, and the vast majority of refined rare earth output.

The factories that extract, separate, and prepare the 17 metals on which every modern military and every modern AI system depends are owned, supervised, or subsidised by the Chinese Communist Party.

The Politburo did not stumble into this position. It built it deliberately, patiently, over forty years, while America was wasting time and money fighting unwinnable wars.

And over the past few years, China has begun restricting the flow.

Beijing has imposed export controls on gallium and germanium, quietly throttled rare-earth shipments to Western buyers, and forced companies like Tesla to apply for licences just to keep production lines running.

The message from Beijing is clear – whoever depends on the new spice will sit at China's mercy.

Trump's Bid for Arrakis

In Washington, the Trump administration has finally understood the existential threat of China’s control on the materials that power AI.

And the radical measures being taken could have a huge impact on every aspect of your financial life.

In February of this year President Trump signed an executive order authorizing a $12 billion strategic stockpile of critical minerals. The administration calls it Project Vault.

Behind it sits a national reserve already exceeding$2 trillion in committed capital, a treaty signed by 13 foreign nations at the State Department…

Bilateral deals with Saudi Arabia and the UAE worth more than a trillion dollars combined…

Government equity stakes in MP Materials, Lithium Americas and Trilogy Metals, and $500 billion in Ukrainian mineral rights…

The obsession with Greenland, the endless tariffs, the President’s close relationship with Musk, OpenAI and Palantir…

It’s all connected to America's bid for control of the new spice.

And Trump is going all in.

Because securing the new spice is not the end of the story. It is part of something even larger – a complete overhaul of the U.S. dollar.

For 50 years, our currency has been anchored to a single deal struck in the Saudi desert. In 1974, Henry Kissinger persuaded King Faisal to price every barrel of oil exported from Saudi Arabia in U.S. dollars.

Within a year, every other OPEC nation followed. The dollar was now backed by something the modern world could not function without. They called it the petrodollar.

That arrangement quietly expired in June of 2024 And what our research indicates is being assembled in its place could be the foundation of a new monetary order.

One anchored not to Saudi oil, but to the new spice. To the materials and resources America needs to dominate AI.

I call it the Silicon Dollar.

And I believe it could trigger an historic repricing of goods and assets traded inside the U.S. – just as it did half a century ago.

Over the decades that followed Kissinger’s deal in the desert, a great dividing line cleaved the nation in two.

Almost 24 million new millionaires have been created by the petrodollar since the 1970s. Yet, at the same time, millions of others saw their financial lives slowly hollowed out.

That same dividing line is being drawn once again. And I believe what you do with your money between now and December 2026 may very well decide which side you end up on.

That’s why I’ve laid out the full story in my new documentary, which you can watch here for free.

You’ll discover the full story behind Trump's audacious monetary reset – including the executive orders and historic treaties that set it in motion…

And the five companies sitting at the chokepoints of America's new spice trade – including the name and ticker of one asset that could benefit as this story accelerates.

Here’s everything you need to know.

Good investing
Porter Stansberry