America’s Biggest Rare-Earth Producer Makes a Play to End China’s Dominance
Fresh Pentagon investment is turbocharging MP Materials’ goals, but the hurdles it has faced—and still faces—highlight the challenge of reviving the industry in the U.S.
FORT WORTH—At an industrial site in this Texas city, men dressed in head-to-toe protective gear dip giant ladles into a well of molten metal heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. They’re making something the U.S. has hardly, if ever, produced at commercial scale in recent decades: rare-earth metals.
The factory is the most visible mark of MP Materials’ MP 7.56%increase; green up pointing triangle high-stakes, billion-dollar bet that an American company can take on China’s dominance over the metals—and the magnets they power in everything from cars and smartphones to missile systems.
In recent months, China has used its chokehold over 90% of the world’s rare-earth magnets to cut off access to Western companies, rattling industrial giants such as Ford and Tesla and forcing the U.S. to the table for trade talks.
MP has invested more than $1 billion in new infrastructure and equipment. A mine it controls in California has become the largest source of rare-earth minerals in the Western Hemisphere. Now, with its expanding Texas facility and fresh investment from the Pentagon, the company is racing to complete the supply chain so it can start converting large quantities of its minerals into high-grade magnets.
General Motors is signed up to start taking deliveries later this year. The Defense Department last week committed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in MP and become its largest shareholder, in a deal that will allow MP to increase its planned magnet production to 10,000 metric tons from the previously planned 1,000. As of now, the name of the new factory is simply “10x.”
A White House spokesman said the deal “marks a major step in rebuilding America’s domestic rare earth industry.” The company’s stock jumped around 50% on the day of the announcement, and has tripled this year. Some rivals also gained.
After years of private and government investment under Trump and Biden, magnet-makers are expanding across the U.S. in an effort to build an industrial base that could meet soaring demand independently of China.
Substantially cutting America’s dependence on Chinese rare-earth magnets won’t be easy, or cheap. But some experts posit it could theoretically be achieved within three to five years, if the current slate of projects push ahead.
Vulcan Elements, a Durham, N.C.-based magnet maker founded by a former Navy officer, plans to supply the military starting next year. Noveon, in San Marcos, Texas, has signed a deal to supply U.S.-made rare-earth magnets to Japan’s Nidec, among the world’s biggest motor makers. German magnet specialist VAC is expected to begin operating a large, Pentagon-funded factory near Sumter, S.C., later this year.
The projects are expected to have a combined capacity to produce several thousand metric tons of the magnets by the end of the year, which adds up to around a third or more of current U.S. imports.
“As we start to build out our permanent magnet manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and elsewhere, China starts to lose that leverage,” said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the critical minerals security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
MP, she added, is “essentially working at warp speed to address one of America’s greatest national and economic security challenges of our time.”
The company’s journey there highlights the hurdles American producers face as they look to reawaken the industry.
Chinese dominance
China still holds most of the rare-earth cards. It has some of the world’s best mines. It also has cheap chemicals for processing, a large technically trained workforce and a stomach for handling toxic rare-earth mining waste.
Western producers have long complained that the country uses its dominance to prevent competitors from emerging, sometimes by flooding the market with supplies, sometimes by adopting restrictive export policies. Beijing has banned the export of key rare-earth technologies and is compiling a list of China’s rare-earth scientists to ensure they don’t share their knowledge abroad.
For some companies, finding another source has become critical.
In April, China began requiring buyers of rare-earth magnets to submit elaborate export applications proving they don’t have military links. The slow processing of these applications forced a Ford SUV plant to temporarily close and sent the wider industry into a panic. One auto supplier paid more than $15 a piece for tiny magnets that usually sell for less than 40 cents, according to a trader familiar with the transaction.
“We cannot get any high-power magnets without China,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said at an event in late June.
Although U.S.-China trade negotiations have led to two separate truces that were supposed to make magnet supplies flow again, exports from China have remained lower than anticipated, especially to defense suppliers.
Some U.S. companies have said they are willing to pay a premium for supply-chain security. They may have to. MP and other emerging suppliers don’t disclose the price of their magnets, but people involved in the industry say they are likely to be, at a minimum, 50% more expensive to produce than China’s.
A rare opportunity
The U.S. has significant underground reserves of rare earths, 17 little-known minerals such as neodymium and samarium. Magnets made from the metals are especially strong, able to attract objects hundreds of times their own weight. But mining and processing the minerals is complex and expensive. The country’s once-thriving industry collapsed in the 1990s and 2000s, unable to compete with China.
A few companies tried at various points to revive it and push into magnet-making. Most failed, incurring big losses for investors. Some in the industry concluded that without government support it was too difficult to beat Chinese prices.
MP co-founders James Litinsky and Michael Rosenthal got into the business almost by accident.
Since the middle of the 20th century, rare earths had been dug from Mountain Pass, a rich deposit in California’s Mojave Desert that for decades dominated global production.
Molycorp, the previous company to run the mine, went bankrupt in 2015 after a surge in Chinese rare-earth exports tanked prices. Litinsky and Rosenthal, childhood friends with backgrounds in finance, had invested in Molycorp bonds, hoping to turn a profit. Few others wanted the mine, and the pair worried that a key strategic asset would be abandoned. In 2017 they gained control of Mountain Pass.
“There was a belief that it couldn’t be fixed,” said Litinsky, MP’s chief executive.
He had gotten rich as a young man, after founding a successful Chicago hedge fund at the age of 28, but was looking for a new challenge. “I certainly didn’t know what I was getting myself into.”
MP needed to generate money, and fast, but Litinsky and Rosenthal encountered a bottleneck. Once the ore is mined, it has to undergo a complex process to separate the rare earths from the rock and then isolate the individual minerals. Almost no one outside of China knew how to do that at affordable prices.
Hiring was difficult; the mine had just eight workers—and a lot of wild donkeys—on a remote site that today sits near a billboard with an alien dressed in a cowboy hat advertising beef jerky.
“We’ve got no money, we’ve got eight people, the site was bankrupt, everyone says the U.S. can’t make rare earths,” said Rosenthal, the company’s operations chief. “We couldn’t go to an engineer and say ‘Want to leave Rio Tinto to join us?’”
MP struck an agreement with a Chinese rare-earth company, Shenghe Resources, to provide upfront financing, in exchange for a small stake in MP. Shenghe would then sell MP’s ore to buyers in China, who refined it and then created magnets
As MP got on firmer footing, it used the money it earned from the arrangement to start building its own processing operations. The Pentagon started chipping in grants that came to around $100 million.
Steep learning curve
Although MP’s initial processing operations removed rare earths from the rest of the ore, the company still had to separate out the individual elements, each of which is nearly chemically identical. Rosenthal likened the challenge to designing a chemical process to sort out blue M&Ms from the rest of the M&Ms, and then extracting the cocoa from those candies.
MP built up a plant in California filled with giant vats, called settler-mixers, that gradually winnow out the most valuable rare earths needed in magnets.
By 2023, it was the only U.S. company separating rare earths at commercial scale, allowing it to bypass Chinese refiners and start selling directly to buyers in the U.S., Japan and South Korea.
It is now expanding to separate another class of rare earths: strategically important heavy rare earths, which MP has been stockpiling at its mine.
Despite the progress, the company struggled to stay consistently profitable.
Starting in 2022, a surplus in Chinese rare earths tanked global prices, part of a pattern of Chinese overproduction of critical minerals including nickel, lithium and cobalt that has forced out Western miners around the globe. As prices kept dropping, investors lost patience. MP’s stock crumbled to a fifth of its previous highs.
“I don’t like to be betting behind losing horses,” CNBC analyst Jim Cramer said last year.
Litinsky believed the company’s strategic importance would at some point translate into financial results. But the company still needed to learn how to actually make magnets, as opposed to just processing the ore and sending the minerals to others.
First, they’d need to find the people who could help them.
Magnetic flux
Since rare-earth magnets are hardly made in the U.S. anymore, many of the people with commercial experience are in their 60s and 70s. MP scoured the world for technical talent, netting an executive with experience at a European magnet factory and others with backgrounds at magnet material companies outside of China.
To lead the project, the company hired Alan Lund, a metallurgist who had run a company developing high-performance metal alloys.
Lund was determined to find an anchor customer that would commit to a long-term sales contract. It turned out to be GM, which had analyzed its supply-chain vulnerabilities after Covid-induced shocks and wanted more options.
The next hurdle was finding production equipment for its Fort Worth factory. MP didn’t want to buy in China, the main producer of magnet-making machinery, afraid that Beijing could hold up shipments. That meant seeking out suppliers of tools such as jet mills and furnaces in North America and Europe.
The equipment was more expensive and sometimes required a nearly two-year lead time. But MP’s decisions looked prescient in 2023, when China began expanding export controls to include magnet-production equipment.
MP also had to master the arcane engineering skills needed to make top-quality magnets, including grain boundary diffusion. That process, often abbreviated as GBD, is a way to apply the most expensive materials in a targeted way on the magnet, dramatically lowering the cost.
China is good at it; few others are.
Long before breaking ground in Fort Worth, MP assembled a dedicated team at a small industrial space dubbed “the Garage”—and sometimes called “Bobcat”—to pore over scientific literature and crack the magnet code. Over several years, the company tested different formulations, eventually developing a heavy rare-earth composition that used GBD, and a customized method that gave magnets a consistent coating.
Now, the company is gearing up for commercial-scale magnet production. The front entrance of its Fort Worth plant has a giant American flag composed of red, white and blue hard hats. Compacted rare-earth powders are placed on heat-resistant racks and stuck into furnaces.
Its goal to become a national rare-earths “champion” that can go toe-to-toe with China was turbocharged last week.
Under the deal reached with the Pentagon on Thursday, the Texas plant’s magnet capacity will be tripled and MP will build a second, larger plant. To protect against price fluctuations, the government is setting a price floor for MP’s rare-earth minerals and guaranteeing the purchase of MP’s magnets, giving the company the confidence to plow ahead. Because the Defense Department will likely only require a portion of the magnets, the rest can be sold to commercial customers, like automakers.
But challenges remain. As MP scales up magnet production, it will need to acquire more heavy rare earths than are available at its California mine, which is no easy feat because there are few producers of those outside of China. Building and operating a massive new facility could also create new snags.
Some of its Western competitors say the government’s decision to invest so heavily in a single company could drive promising startups out of the business, hurting U.S. competitiveness over the long term.
“It’s the government picking winners and losers,” said an executive at one rare-earth business, “and they seem to have made a big bet on one company.”
Litinsky says a secure MP is good for the overall industry. “There’s going to be a lot of growth opportunities,” he said.
