MP Materials Plans $1.25B Rare Earth Magnet Campus In DFW Suburb
A small Dallas-Fort Worth suburb is set to get a manufacturing project valued at more than $1.25B that aims to make North Texas the center of the nation’s rare earth magnet supply chain.
MP Materials Corp. will develop a large-scale magnet manufacturing campus, known as 10X, on a 120-acre site in Northlake, a city just north of Fort Worth with a population of around 10,000. The company plans to acquire the site from Ross Perot Jr.'s Hillwood and invest $1.25B to build the campus.
The project will be less than 10 miles from MP Materials’ existing 250K SF Independence facility in Fort Worth. The new campus will boost the company’s annual production capacity to around 10,000 metric tons of neodymium-iron-boron magnets, used in defense applications, data centers and semiconductor manufacturing.
MP Materials plans to break ground soon, as engineering and equipment procurement are already underway. The facility could then begin its final testing procedures in 2028 before becoming fully operational.
“10X is about building industrial strength at a scale the United States has not seen in generations, and the exceptional talent and infrastructure in North Texas make it possible,” MP Materials CEO James Litinsky said in a statement.
The Northlake campus is also designed to reduce the nation's reliance on foreign sources for rare earth magnets, a key component of MP Materials' public-private partnership signed last year with the U.S. Department of Defense. As part of that, the government agency agreed to purchase $400M of the company's stock and 100% of the magnets produced at 10X over its first 10 years.
Northlake, Denton County and the state of Texas gave MP Materials an incentive package for the project that includes grants, abatements and exemptions worth around $200M.
The Northlake site, which is part of Hillwood’s 27,000-acre AllianceTexas master-planned community, was selected through an evaluation process led by CBRE.
“MP Materials has been a strong partner, and this competitive project demonstrates how city, county, and state leaders work together to secure significant new investment in North Texas,” Perot said in a statement.
The raw materials to be used in 10X’s production will come from MP Materials’ rare earth mining and processing facility in California. The Las Vegas-based company began commercial metal production at its Fort Worth facility in 2024.
MP Materials isn't the only company with defense-related applications in North Texas.
Drone manufacturer EagleNXT moved its headquarters from Wichita, Kansas, to Allen in January. The facility will be home to the production of the company’s eBee Vision drone, which has been used by the U.S. Army and various European forces.
Outside of Texas, autonomous systems and weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries received a $310M grant from the state of Ohio's economic development arm last year to construct a manufacturing facility to build drones and other advanced weaponry.
