The United States currently imports around 10,000 tonnes of rare earth magnets a year from China - a number that has sat quietly in the background of every defence procurement meeting, EV strategy session and semiconductor briefing for the better part of a decade.
MP Materials (NYSE: MP) intends to change that.
The company has selected a 120-acre site in Northlake, Texas, for its "10X" rare earth magnet manufacturing campus, committing more than US$1.25 billion to what it is calling the largest and most strategically significant rare earth magnet asset in U.S. history.
Once operational, 10X is expected to push MP's total output to approximately 10,000 metric tons of neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets per year - the permanent magnets used in EV motors, wind turbines, defence systems and advanced semiconductor fabrication equipment.
The campus sits less than 10 miles from MP's existing Independence facility in Fort Worth, giving the company access to shared infrastructure from day one and cementing North Texas as the geographic anchor of the domestic magnet supply chain.
Pentagon locked in for the long run
10X is the centrepiece of MP's public-private partnership with the U.S. Department of War, struck in July 2025.
The deal bundled a $1 billion financing commitment from JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs with a $150 million Pentagon loan to expand MP's Mountain Pass mine in California - the only commercial-scale rare earths operation in the country.
All of 10X's output is committed to the Pentagon under a 10-year offtake agreement, with commercial customers able to access material only by agreement with the DoW, CNBC reported.
The DoW also locked in a minimum price of $110 per kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium oxide for the duration - a floor that strips out a substantial chunk of revenue risk before a single magnet ships.
Texas puts $200m on the table
Texas, Denton County and the City of Northlake assembled an incentive package worth roughly $200 million over more than a decade, including grants, abatements and exemptions, according to the company.
More than $66 million of that came via grants from the Texas Enterprise Fund and Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund, after MP ran a national site evaluation through CBRE.
Engineering and equipment procurement are already underway, with commissioning targeted for 2028 and more than 1,500 direct manufacturing and engineering jobs to follow, Governor Abbott's office confirmed.
MP shares climbed 2% on the announcement to around $60, valuing the company at approximately $10.6 billion.
