Every building, every bridge, every car, every power line, and every AI data center starts with three things dug out of the ground by the billions of tons a year — iron ore, bauxite, and coking coal. This is the “very first mile” of steel and aluminum: a quiet, heavy, boring business, yet so huge that iron ore is one of the most-shipped commodities on Earth, second only to crude oil — and it's controlled by just a handful of companies selling to essentially one customer: China.