USA Rare Earth commissions new magnet production line at Oklahoma plant

USA Rare Earth (Nasdaq: USAR) announced Thursday the successful commissioning of its commercial magnet production line Phase 1a) at its facility in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

The commissioning of the first production line, or Phase 1a, enables the company to begin fulfilling customer orders for sintered neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) permanent magnets in the second quarter of 2026, USAR said in a press release.

The 310,000-square-foot facility in Stillwater — known as Innovation Lab — officially opened in March 2025, having already produced the first batch of sintered magnets earlier in the year.

“Today’s announcement is a major step in delivering on our ambition to build a global champion and the partner of choice in rare earth elements, oxides, metals and magnets,” USA Rare Earth chief executive officer Barbara Humpton said in the release.

“It is also a testament to the hard work of our team and their dedication to our mission. As we scale production, we are proud to help reduce reliance on foreign manufacturing while serving industries critical to our nation and its allies,” Humpton added.

USAR is currently developing a mine-to-magnet value chain backstopped by a large rare earth deposit in Texas known as Round Top, which it aims to bring into production in late 2028.

USAR views the commissioning milestone as a “critical step” in validating any manufacturing line for commercial production at scale. “In this case, it represents the consistent achievement of a complex, multi-step process to make commercial-grade permanent magnets,” the company said.

Currently, more than 100 people work at the Stillwater facility.

Production begins with the formation of rare earth and metallic elements into a powder, then jet milling this powder to 3-5 microns in size — around 20 times finer than a human hair — in an oxygen-restricted environment.

This fine powder is “wet pressed” into large blocks, which are then machined, coated and magnetized to form the final product: high-grade permanent magnets that are essential to the aerospace and defense, semiconductor, energy, data center, and numerous industrial sectors.

USAR expects its production capacity to ramp up to about 600 tonnes a year by the end of the fourth quarter. Combined with the production expected from the next line, called Phase 1b, total active production capacity at Stillwater will double to 1,200 tonnes by the first quarter of 2027.