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Right now, in the Pacific Ocean, billions of potato-sized rocks are scattered across the ocean floor. These lumpy, ugly-looking rocks -- also called polymetallic nodules -- contain critical metals that are becoming increasingly difficult to source and mine on land, including nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese.
Nobody can mine these nodules right now; nobody, indeed, has the legal right to commercialize them. TMC The Metals Company (NASDAQ:TMC), however, is trying to become the first.
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If it does get the right to mine, TMC stock could become a winner overnight. But don't get me wrong: There is no guarantee this company will ever send its nodular collectors to the seafloor -- not anytime soon, at least.
Let's take a look at where TMC The Metals Company stands today after a sell-off to see if this metal stock is worth considering.
TMC is in an unusual place for a business. It has already tested and shown that its machines can collect nodules from the seafloor. It holds exploration rights over vast stretches of the Pacific seabed and has identified enormous lodes of valuable metals.
Those are all seemingly positive things. But there's a rather enormous catch: TMC doesn't have permission to mine these nodules commercially. And there's no guarantee it ever will.
For starters, the International Seabed Authority (ISA), established under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, has yet to finalize regulations governing commercial deep-sea mining. Indeed, after many years of negotiations, the ISA has not issued a single commercial mining contract, nor does it appear to be close to doing so.
Because of this impasse, TMC has pursued permission from the U.S. government, which never ratified the convention that created the ISA. Since early 2025, Washington has become increasingly supportive of deep-sea mining, as extracting polymetallic nodules there could help it reduce its dependence on foreign sources of the same land-mined minerals.
I want to be clear on something. Yes, the U.S. could permit TMC to mine nodules commercially under its own legal framework. But if the ISA continues to maintain that mining in international waters must be governed through its framework, the variance of opinion could spark a legal and diplomatic controversy.
I'm not saying this contradiction would run counter to TMC's ambitions -- it could urge the ISA to finalize its rulebook -- but the uncertainty about whether it could is what makes TMC such a risky investment, particularly when the company has yet to prove that mining these nodules will be profitable at a commercial level.
As such, the uncertainty around this company does two things at once: It makes the potential upside enormous, while also making the risk of substantial losses pretty difficult to ignore. For now, TMC remains a stock best suited to investors with a fairly high tolerance for risk -- and an even higher tolerance for the unknown.
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Steven Porrello has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Down 75% From Its High, Is TMC The Metals Company Stock a Buy? was originally published by The Motley Fool
