The Atacama salt flat contains the world's largest and most economically accessible lithium brine deposit. Chile has been mining it since the 1980s, and the two companies that hold extraction concessions — SQM and Albemarle — have between them supplied roughly a quarter of global lithium demand for the past decade. What neither anticipated, in early 2023, was that their operating model was about to change fundamentally.

President Boric's National Lithium Strategy, announced in April 2023, required that all future lithium concessions include a 51 percent ownership stake for the state copper company Codelco or the state lithium entity ENAMI. Existing operators were given a choice: renegotiate their concession terms to include state participation, or face non-renewal when current licences expired. SQM, whose Atacama licence runs to 2030, accepted renegotiation in December 2023; Albemarle is in ongoing talks.

The two-year balance sheet is genuinely ambiguous. New exploration investment fell 34 percent in 2024 as junior mining companies redirected capital to Argentina and Australia, where ownership terms are more permissive. But the renegotiated SQM contract has delivered USD 1.8 billion in additional state revenue in its first eighteen months — funds that the government has directed to regional development in Antofagasta, the desert region where most extraction occurs.

The global market effect has been to accelerate diversification of lithium supply away from Chilean sources — a development that Chilean producers are watching with concern as it may structurally reduce the premium their high-quality brine product has historically commanded.

"The question was never whether lithium belongs to Chile," said Finance Minister Mario Marcel. "The question was how to turn that ownership into lasting prosperity rather than a temporary windfall."