Rare Earth Magnet Manufacturing: Sumitomo to ABB

Most electric car motors, many wind generators and the hard drive in an older laptop rely on small grey blocks of neodymium, iron and boron. This post is about rare earth magnet manufacturing: how Japanese and American researchers found the NdFeB magnet in the early 1980s, how production moved almost entirely to China, and how new plants in Texas and Estonia started shipping magnets in September 2026. It also looks at the steps inside a magnet plant where robots can help, which ABB robots could do that work, and why ABB also builds motors that need no magnets at all.

An arc-shaped neodymium magnet with its nickel plating removed, the kind of segment used in motors. Photo: Tremaster / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How the neodymium magnet was found and lost

For most of the 20th century, strong permanent magnets meant alnico, an alloy of aluminium, nickel and cobalt, and later cheap ceramic ferrites. In the 1960s researchers found that samarium and cobalt made far stronger magnets, but cobalt was expensive and its supply was unreliable. Engineers wanted a magnet made from cheaper, more common metals. Alnico magnets were cast in foundries and then ground to shape, and the hard, brittle castings were handled by people at every step.

Alnico magnets in many shapes made by the Arnold Engineering Company in 1956. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In 1982 Masato Sagawa at Sumitomo Special Metals in Japan made a sintered magnet from neodymium, iron and boron, while General Motors developed a rapidly quenched NdFeB powder of its own, and both were announced in 1984. GM put its version into production through a division called Magnequench, which began making magnets in Indiana in 1986. Hard disk drives, and later electric motors of every size, soon depended on the new magnets.

Masato Sagawa, who developed the sintered NdFeB magnet at Sumitomo Special Metals, at a conference in 2014. Photo: Christina.h.chen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the 1990s GM sold Magnequench to a group of investors that included Chinese buyers, and production moved from Indiana to China. GM had sold off a business built on its own invention. China had the huge Bayan Obo deposit in Inner Mongolia and low processing costs. GreenCars reports that for decades China processed upwards of 90% of the world's rare earth materials, including almost all the magnets. The Mountain Pass mine in California closed for years, and after it reopened much of its concentrate went to China for processing.

An old 1986 hard disk with its heads moved by a voice coil motor, one of the uses that came to rely on strong permanent magnets. Photo: Fil22plm / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

New magnet plants in Texas and Estonia

In September 2026 that started to change. MP Materials, which runs Mountain Pass, began making magnets for General Motors at its plant in Fort Worth, Texas. Ore from the mine is processed into material that is melted, powdered, pressed into moulds and sintered into finished magnets. At full production the plant should ship about 1 million magnets a day, or 3,000 tonnes a year, with 1,000 tonnes going to GM. A GM large motor uses 192 magnets, and GM expects production vehicles with these magnets by the end of 2026. MP is also building a second plant, about five times the size, roughly 10 miles away.

The Mountain Pass rare earth mine and processing facility in California, owned by MP Materials. Photo: Tmy350 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Europe got its first plant of this kind the same month. On 14 September 2026 Neo Performance Materials said its magnet factory in Narva, Estonia, was in commercial production and shipping sintered magnets to a Tier 1 traction motor maker. The first phase is designed for about 2,000 tonnes of magnets a year. Neo said it built the plant in under two years and expects two or three automotive programs in production before the end of 2026. Both plants face the same job: thousands of small brittle parts that must be pressed, sintered, ground, coated and checked to tight tolerances.

Rare earth oxide powders, with neodymium among them, photographed by the US Department of Agriculture. Photo: Peggy Greb, USDA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A pressed magnet is fragile before sintering and has to be placed in boxes or trays for the furnace without chipping. Finished magnets are ground to size and inspected, which is classic machine tending for compact arms like the IRB 1300 or IRB 1200. Further down the chain, robots insert magnets into rotor stacks, as our post on electric motor manufacturing shows. We have found no source naming the robots used at Fort Worth or Narva, so ABB's role here is a possibility. On smaller lines where people still load presses, a cobot such as the GoFa CRB 15000 could work beside them.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

What magnet factories still have to solve

Demand will keep growing with EVs, wind turbines, drones and robots themselves, and every country building a magnet plant will need to compete with Chinese prices. Automation is one way Western plants hope to close that gap. Robot cells can run around the clock, handle parts the same way every time and log every magnet for traceability, which car makers ask for. Cells like these are usually planned and tested in RobotStudio before a plant buys hardware, which helps a new magnet maker with no experience of its own.

The electric motor of a Nissan Leaf shown at the 2011 Drive Electric Tour in Washington, DC. Photo: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Magnetized parts are hard to handle. A finished NdFeB magnet snaps to steel grippers, fixtures and other magnets with great force, which can chip it or trap a finger. For this reason magnets are often handled unmagnetized and charged late in the process, and robot grippers for magnetized parts have to be built from non-magnetic materials. Recycling adds another task: MP Materials also has a deal to supply Apple with recycled magnets, and pulling magnets out of old motors and drives is fiddly work that robots may take over.

A worker guides a large motor on a hoist at ABB's IEC low voltage motor plant in Shanghai. Photo: ABB

ABB also makes IE5 synchronous reluctance motors for industry that use no rare earth magnets at all, which reduces the need for magnets in pumps and fans. EV traction motors still mostly need NdFeB, so the new magnet plants will need people as well as machines. Cost is the main brake, since Western plants start far behind on price. Skills are the other, as GreenCars notes MP had no magnet experience before GM's purchase agreement gave it the backing to build its Fort Worth factory.

A technician at work on a motor at ABB's Vaasa motor plant. Photo: ABB

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