Solcoa Industries is producing zero-carbon, American-made rare earth metals — for under $40/kg vs. $100 market price

Summary

Solcoa Industries is building domestic rare earth metal production in the US, targeting a supply chain that is almost entirely controlled by China. The company's founder, Human, describes a straightforward gap: the US has mines and raw material, but no meaningful capacity to convert that material into usable metals. Every fighter jet requires 920 pounds of rare earth metals. Every phone contains eight types. Every electric car motor depends on them. China processes virtually all of it.

The technology bet

Most Western companies attempting to reshore production are copying the Chinese standard process, molten oxide fluoride electrolysis, which emits perfluorocarbons at 5,000 times the potency of CO2 and is uneconomical outside China. Solcoa is developing an alternative process that eliminates those emissions entirely. The system is carbon-zero and, Human says, produces metal for under $40 per kilogram against a market price of roughly $100. That cost advantage is the central claim, and it is what makes Western-scale production viable rather than just aspirational.

Solcoa works both feedstocks: primary material shipped directly from US mines rather than to China for processing, and secondary material recovered from existing magnets, including hard drive waste from data centers and motors from scrapped electric vehicles. The existing recycling industry does some of this, but the current multi-step process involves acid leaching, oxide separation, and a final metalization step that still routes through China. Solcoa says it collapses that into a single step.

Demand and timing

China's recent export ban on heavy rare earths, a direct response to US tariffs, has already disrupted magnet supply chains. Dysprosium, which makes up roughly 5% of the rare earth content in high-performance magnets, is caught in that ban. Human argues that even without the geopolitical pressure, demand was set to quadruple over the coming decades as clean energy, EV, and defense production scales. The ban simply makes the urgency harder to ignore.

On data centers specifically, Solcoa is already working with hard drive magnets and exploring partnerships with data centers to recover rare earths from waste streams that operators currently shred. Hard drives and semiconductor manufacturing processes are both heavy users of rare earth-dependent magnets.

Scale and comparables

Solcoa is planning its first demonstration plant and is considering Redwood Materials' facility in Reno as a potential site. Human frames Redwood, co-founded by JB Straubel, as a learning reference rather than a competitor, citing its track record of getting novel battery recycling technology to meaningful scale in the West. Solcoa's ambition is directly analogous: take a process innovation and industrialize it in a domestic footprint, before the market fully prices in the supply risk it is already living through.