Cobalt off American Sāmoa, 7 Samoan Pages per Million

In an integrated circuit, copper and cobalt form the wiring between the transistors. Chipmakers also use gallium, germanium and palladium. The U.S. Geological Survey put copper on its federal list of minerals essential to the national economy in 2025. Its Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 estimates 5 billion tons of cobalt in polymetallic nodules on the seafloor. A 2022 USGS study placed global seabed nickel at about 4.5 billion tons.

In 2025 the United States relied on imports for all of its gallium and manganese. Imports supplied 57% of the copper metal and the palladium consumed in the country. Germanium imports exceeded 50% of consumption. Makers of integrated circuits used 73% of the gallium consumed in the country. China has required export licenses for gallium and germanium since 2023. A chip designed in the United States is likely fabricated in Taiwan, China, with lithography machines from the Netherlands. The environmental costs of that hardware concentrate at data centers and at mine sites.

In April 2025, Executive Order 14285 directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to speed up reviews of seabed exploration licenses. The order sought seabed minerals to secure nickel supplies. Several companies then applied for areas with nickel-bearing crusts and nodules. On July 17, 2026, the bureau published the Proposed Leasing Notice for PACM-1, the Pacific Mineral Lease Sale 1 off American Sāmoa. Bidders may compete for 2 lease areas of about 16.3 million acres and 15.2 million acres, their combined extent about 31.5 million acres.

In the Pacific, New Caledonia produced an estimated 140,000 tons of mined nickel in 2025 against 116,000 tons in 2024. World mine output rose 5% to about 3.9 million tons. Indonesia mined some 2.6 million tons of that total. The USGS places seafloor crusts and nodules, together with hydrothermal deposits, at 10% of world nickel resources. Its tables report those resources apart from reserves, the tonnage economically extractable at the time of the estimate.

Once published, the notice gave the Governor of American Sāmoa 60 days to comment, until September 15. Governor Pulaaliʻi Nikolao Pula filed formal comments with the Secretary of the Interior. In reports published on September 18, he stated that American Sāmoa does not support commercial deep-sea mineral extraction at this time. His 14 recommendations give priority to research and environmental baseline studies. Mapping and monitoring appear in the list as well. Further recommendations propose protections for fisheries and a revenue-sharing mechanism for the territory.

Challenging a finding by the National Marine Fisheries Service, Faʻasao Amerika Samoa and the Conservation Council for Hawaiʻi sued the service on August 18 in the U.S. District Court for Hawaiʻi. Under the Endangered Species Act, the service had concluded that seabed mining is not likely to adversely affect listed whales and sea turtles. A spokesperson for the plaintiffs called those species measina, the Samoan word for cultural treasures.

To map the nodule fields, NOAA began fieldwork in February 2026 on a $20 million survey of more than 30,000 square nautical miles off American Sāmoa. The survey targets manganese, nickel, cobalt and copper in polymetallic nodules. The bureau published a Proposed Leasing Notice for PACM-2, off the Northern Mariana Islands, on August 18, 2026. It lists 5 lease areas and a proposed sale on December 16. The southern boundary of its western areas is 57 miles from Saipan and 46 miles from Guam.

On the data side of AI, Common Crawl, the open web archive, publishes the primary language of the pages in its crawls. In crawl CC-MAIN-2026-39, English is the primary language of 41.86% of HTML pages. Samoan is the primary language of 0.0007%, about 7 pages per million. In crawl CC-MAIN-2026-34, the Samoan share stood at 0.0008%.

On March 1, 2025, Executive Order 14224 made English the official language of the United States and revoked Executive Order 13166. That order dated from 2000 and had directed federal departments to improve access for people with limited English proficiency. It took the Justice Department 45 days to rescind its 2002 guidance on limited English proficiency.

The department followed with a memorandum on July 14, 2025. It directed departments to phase out unnecessary non-English services and to use AI and machine translation to save costs. Huri publishes a side-by-side comparison of machine output in Gagana Sāmoa. After March 1, 2025, a notice template drafted under EO 13166 cites an order with no force. A termbase entry for that citation records the status deprecated from that date. The entry names EO 14224 as the superseding instrument.

Huri translators localised language-identification taglines and vital-document notices into several Pacific languages for a public body. The tagline names the language in its own spelling and states that interpretation is free. The language list from the client printed the wrong language name for a community. The reviewer restored the endonym and its orthography. The named interpreting service stayed in English under an entry on the do-not-translate list. In a further query, the reviewer asked whether the email field label stayed untranslated.

The bureau named the PACM-1 blocks after fish and seafloor features, Achilles Tang and Small Toothed Jobfish among them. Those names are legal identifiers in the lease. On a Samoan consultation set, Huri terminologists list such identifiers as do-not-translate entries. A gloss column beside them names the fish for a reader in Pago Pago. The bureau will livestream the PACM-1 auction from Camarillo, California, on November 19.