California based plant to produce 500 tonnes of rare earth metal annually

Solcoa Industries has raised $75 million to build a commercial rare earth metalmaking plant in California, aiming to reduce the US reliance on China for materials used in electric vehicles, robotics, and defense systems. The financing will support construction of Solcoa One, a facility planned to begin operations in July 2027 with an annual production capacity of 500 tonnes of rare earth metals. The company says the plant will be among the largest rare earth metallization operations in the Western world. The funding includes $45 million in equity led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Gigascale Capital, Long Journey, Felicis and other investors. Another $30 million comes from debt and equipment financing anchored by JPMorgan. A bottleneck in the rare earth supply chain Rare earth metals are used to manufacture high-performance permanent magnets that help power electric vehicles, industrial robots, wind turbines and defense equipment. However, converting refined rare earth oxides into usable metals, a process known as metallization, remains a major bottleneck in the global supply chain. According to Solcoa, China controls approximately 95% of global rare earth metallization capacity. The company says conventional metalmaking methods are expensive, hazardous and difficult to permit, limiting the development of production facilities elsewhere. The issue is particularly significant for US defense suppliers. Under the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, restrictions already prohibit certain contractors from purchasing samarium-cobalt and neodymium-iron-boron magnets produced in China, Russia, Iran or North Korea. Beginning January 1, 2027, the restrictions are scheduled to extend to magnets containing rare earth materials mined, refined, separated, melted, or produced in those countries. That creates additional pressure on manufacturers to establish compliant supply chains for the metals used in high-performance magnets. Founded in 2025, Solcoa is developing an alternative to conventional molten-salt electrolysis, the process commonly used to convert rare earth oxides into metals. The company says its technology uses halide-free chemistries and modular reactors designed and manufactured at its Alameda, California, facility. According to Solcoa, the process is faster, consumes less energy, and costs less than legacy methods. The company also claims its approach produces no harmful emissions, including toxic fluoride gases and perfluorocarbons associated with conventional metallization. These performance and environmental claims have been made by Solcoa and have not been independently established in the supplied announcement. Rather than relying on a single large industrial facility, Solcoa says its modular approach lets be added production capacity incrementally, with individual reactors taking weeks to manufacture. The company reports that it has already scaled from a laboratory research reactor to producing more than 10 tonnes of magnet-grade metal annually. It says it is among the few companies outside China that can produce neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) and samarium metal, and is already shipping material from Alameda. Scaling to 500 tonnes annually The new financing will fund construction and commissioning of Solcoa One, expand reactor manufacturing in Alameda, and hire across engineering and research teams. At its planned 500-tonne annual capacity, the facility could produce enough NdPr metal to supply magnets for up to one million electric vehicles, the company says. Solcoa CEO Hooman Reza Nezhad said the company intends to develop a fundamentally different metalmaking process rather than replicate China’s existing industrial methods.For US manufacturers, the challenge extends beyond mining and refining rare earths to establishing the intermediate processing capacity required to turn those materials into usable metals. Solcoa’s next milestone will be demonstrating that its existing production technology can operate at commercial scale. The company is targeting July 2027 for Solcoa One to begin operations, although the planned start date and production capacity remain company projections.Get the latest in engineering, tech, space & science - delivered daily to your inbox.Kaif Shaikh is a journalist and writer passionate about turning complex information into clear, impactful stories. His writing covers technology, sustainability, geopolitics, and occasionally fiction. A graduate in Journalism and Mass Communication, his work has appeared in the Times of India and beyond. After a near-fatal experience, Kaif began seeing both stories and silences differently. Outside work, he juggles far too many projects and passions, but always makes time to read, reflect, and hold onto the thread of wonder.