Apple has pledged $500 million to purchase American-made rare earth magnets made by MP Materials at its flagship facility in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of another effort to broaden its supply chain in the US.
The only fully integrated rare earth manufacturer in the United States is MP Materials, which has its headquarters in Las Vegas. A multi-year agreement with Apple calls for the expansion of its Texas facility to add multiple neodymium magnet production lines made especially for Apple goods.
Many Apple devices, such as iPads, Macs, Apple Watches, and iPhones, frequently have magnets. Since the Taptic Engine of the iPhone 11 in 2019, Apple has begun incorporating recycled rare earth elements into its devices.
Nearly all of the magnets used in Apple devices are now made entirely of recycled earth components. The business has experimented with a number of techniques to recover these elements; for example, its robot Daisy is capable of disassembling 200 iPhones in an hour. In order to recover steel and tungsten, another robot by the name of Dave disassembles Taptic Engines.
Additionally, Apple revealed that the two businesses will collaborate to "create novel magnet materials and creative processing technologies to boost magnet performance" and construct a rare earth recycling line in Mountain Pass, California.
The two businesses have been collaborating on "advanced recycling technology that enables recycled rare earth magnets to be converted into material that fulfills Apple’s rigorous criteria for performance and design" for almost five years. For use in Apple goods, the new factory will reprocess recovered rare earth feedstock, such as post-industrial scrap and material from old devices.
Apple plans to invest $500 billion in the US over the next four years, including this most recent promise. With "re-shoring production to the United States" as one of its main objectives, the Cupertino behemoth was among the well-known companies impacted by the Trump tariffs that were announced earlier this year.