Solcoa Industries raises $75M to build America's first rare earth metals plant in Nevada, targeting samarium shortage in defense

Solcoa Industries raises $75M to build America's first rare earth metals plant

Solcoa Industries is betting that the rare earth supply chain doesn't have a mining problem — it has a processing problem. Hooman Reza Nezhad, the company's founder, announced a $75 million raise to fund Silico 1, a 500-ton-per-year rare earth metallization plant in Nevada that is scheduled to commission on July 4, 2026.

The plant will produce two metals: NDPR, used primarily in electric vehicle motors, and samarium, used almost exclusively in defense applications including the F-35 and guided missiles. China banned samarium exports and remains one of the only producers, creating what Nezhad describes as an acute shortage in the defense market right now. That shortage is the commercial opening Solcoa is stepping into first.

“We just raised $75,000,000 for our Silico 1 project. It's our 500 ton per year rare earth mineralization plant in Nevada. / China banned the export of samarium. So there is this enormous shortage in the defense market right now for samarium. / Ford shut down a factory because they just couldn't source enough of these materials.”

Why processing, not mining, is the bottleneck

Rare earth ore is available in the West. There are significant deposits in Australia, California, and dozens of scaling projects across the region. The problem is what happens after extraction. The processing technologies used in China today were originally American, developed through the Manhattan Project and later exported. China matured them, scaled them, and now dominates through a combination of labor costs roughly ten times lower than in the West and power costs roughly a third of what US producers face.

Nezhad argues that simply copying China's existing technology stack is economically unworkable — the numbers still don't close, even with geopolitical tailwinds. Solcoa's answer is new chemistry rather than imported process. The engineering and R&D hub, where Nezhad spoke, is where those processes are developed; Nevada is purely production. Once a process is mature, it moves to the Nevada site.

Customer base

Solcoa sells directly to automakers, magnet makers, and defense primes. After China's export restrictions in April of last year, automakers began moving upstream, sourcing raw oxides and metals directly to build stockpiles rather than relying on their magnet production partners to manage supply. Nezhad cites Ford shutting down a factory due to material shortages as a concrete example of what that disruption looks like. That dynamic has pulled Solcoa into direct relationships with major auto companies rather than routing exclusively through intermediaries.

Longer ambition

Defense is an important near-term market, but Nezhad is clear that the defense-only framing undersells what Solcoa is trying to do. The goal is to compete with China in the open market at scale — not to survive on subsidies. Whether new processing chemistry can close the cost gap enough to make that viable without permanent government support is the central question the company's Nevada plant will start to answer in mid-2026.