MP Materials offers drone makers reserved magnet capacity, from 2028

Project Swarm lets domestic and allied manufacturers reserve magnet supply for up to 2 million drones a year, from a $1.3 billion plant being built with the Pentagon.

MP Materials has launched Project Swarm, a programme letting drone and motor manufacturers reserve rare-earth magnet capacity in advance. Chairman and CEO James Litinsky says any domestic or allied manufacturer can reserve up to 2 million drones of magnet capacity a year. The supply would come from the company's $1.3 billion 10X magnet facility being built in Northlake, Texas, in partnership with the Department of Defense, and would begin when that plant starts operating in 2028.

The bottleneck being addressed is narrow and genuinely binding. Neodymium magnets sit inside every drone motor, and refining and magnet-making are concentrated almost entirely outside the United States. A reservation programme is an attempt to fix that with demand certainty rather than subsidy: manufacturers commit early, MP can finance and size the line against real orders, and the drone makers get a supply line that does not depend on an export licence.

What exists today is a plant under construction and a set of conversations. MP says it has begun forming agreements with multiple drone manufacturers and is expanding outreach to motor makers, and it names none of them. The 2-million-drone figure is the company's own capacity arithmetic, not an order book. And 2028 is two years out, which on this site means the card is filed as coming rather than released. Reserved capacity is not delivered capacity, and no magnet has been made.

Source: Manufacturing Dive