Toronto-based Cyclic Materials opened a $30 million, 144,000-square-foot facility in Mesa, Arizona on September 9, 2026, deploying its proprietary MagCycle automated magnet-separation technology at commercial scale for the first time anywhere in the world. With capacity to process up to 25,000 metric tons of magnet-bearing end-of-life products annually, the plant represents a concrete step toward domestic rare earth supply security at a moment when China's export controls have left U.S. manufacturers acutely exposed. A second integrated campus in South Carolina is slated for groundbreaking before year's end.
Introduction
On September 9, 2026, Cyclic Materials cut the ribbon on a 144,000-square-foot facility in Mesa, Arizona that the company describes as the world's first commercial-scale deployment of its MagCycle automated magnet-separation technology. The plant, which required more than $30 million in capital investment and was commissioned in just 17 months from the initial announcement, can process up to 25,000 metric tons of magnet-bearing end-of-life products per year at a throughput rate of eight tonnes per hour. More than 7,000 metric tons of feedstock had already been delivered to the site before the ribbon was cut, and the first commercial shipments of Cyclic's rare earth magnet concentrate to U.S. customers are expected before the end of September 2026.
The opening ceremony drew senior federal representation, including U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade William Kimmitt, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, Mesa Mayor Mark Freeman, and Senator Mark Kelly. The presence of a senior Commerce Department official at a recycling plant grand opening is itself a signal of how dramatically Washington's framing of rare earth recovery has shifted: what was once categorized as an environmental or waste-management activity is now treated as a national security imperative in its own right.
For an industry accustomed to measuring progress in decades, the Mesa milestone is notable for its speed. Cyclic Materials was founded in Kingston, Ontario in 2021 by Ahmad Ghahreman, a hydrometallurgist who traces the origin of MagCycle technology to the COVID lockdowns, when he disassembled a laptop hard drive he had purchased secondhand. As Ghahreman told the audience at the grand opening, "I guess it's fitting that the very last job of the same laptop was to help me figure out the very first iteration of the process that we have installed here today: MagCycle." That initial experiment, less than six years ago, has now become a commercial facility processing the equivalent of a large fraction of the Southwest's annual magnet-bearing waste stream.
MagCycle Technology: What It Does and Why It Matters
MagCycle is Cyclic Materials' proprietary automated mechanical separation system. Its core function is to identify and extract permanent neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets from a heterogeneous stream of end-of-life products, including discarded electronics, hard disk drives, automotive components, robotics assemblies, and medical devices. The technology is deliberately feedstock-agnostic, meaning the Mesa facility can accept a wide variety of input materials without extensive pre-sorting by the supplier.
The output of the MagCycle process is a product Cyclic calls Mag-Xtract, a rare earth magnet concentrate that retains the neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium bound up in the original magnets. Mag-Xtract is then sold to U.S. customers for further refining into the separated rare earth oxides needed to manufacture new magnets. The Mesa facility also recovers copper, aluminum, and steel as co-products, which are sold into existing domestic smelter networks, adding a secondary revenue stream and reducing the volume of magnet-bearing scrap that would otherwise leave the country as undifferentiated waste.
MagCycle operates as the front end of a two-stage platform. The back end, known as REEPure, is a hydrometallurgical refining process that converts Mag-Xtract into recycled Mixed Rare Earth Oxides (rMREO). REEPure currently operates at Cyclic's Kingston, Ontario facility, which opened its first commercial Hub unit in June 2024 at 100 metric tons per year of capacity. That arrangement means the full rare earth recovery loop is not yet entirely onshore in the United States, a gap the company's South Carolina campus is designed to close by 2028.
The technology was tested at the Kingston site for approximately two years before Cyclic committed to commercial deployment in Mesa. COO Matt Cherevaty described the MagCycle system at the grand opening ceremony, emphasizing its ability to handle the scale and diversity of feedstocks available in the Southwest. That regional feedstock opportunity is substantial: Cyclic estimates the area generates approximately 155,000 tons per year of end-of-life components from automotive and e-scrap metals alone, a figure Cherevaty cited when explaining the selection of Mesa as the site for the technology's commercial debut.
Geopolitical Context: Why This Facility Opened When It Did
The Mesa plant did not emerge in a vacuum. China, which controls roughly 60 percent of global rare earth mining output and an even larger share of magnet-grade separation and manufacturing, introduced its first wave of export controls on seven heavy rare earth elements in April 2025. The impact on U.S. and European manufacturers was immediate: yttrium shipments to the United States fell to approximately 42 percent of pre-restriction volumes, dysprosium to 41 percent, and terbium to 49 percent. Some automotive manufacturers were forced to cut production line utilization rates or temporarily halt operations as permanent magnet supplies dried up.
A second wave of controls, covering five additional elements including holmium, erbium, and europium, was introduced in October 2025. Those additional restrictions were suspended until November 10, 2026 following diplomatic engagement between Xi and Trump, but the April 2025 controls remain fully operative. Meanwhile, a December 2025 escalation effectively denied export licenses to any company with affiliations to foreign militaries, and Chinese rare earth magnet exports to the United States have declined every month since October 2025. Project Blue Research Director David Merriman summarized the outlook for industry observers in January 2026: "The ex-China market will continue to face bottlenecks in the supply of HREE products over 2026 and 2027 as alternative suppliers of HREEs are constructed and commissioned."
Building on my analysis of the Serra Verde merger, MIIT quota movements, and the coal ash resource assessment in September 2026, the Mesa opening fits a pattern in which Western supply strategy is simultaneously becoming more mature and more exposed to short-term disruption. Mining projects take a decade or more from discovery to production. Recycling infrastructure, as the Mesa commissioning timeline demonstrates, can reach commercial scale in 17 months. That asymmetry is precisely why the July 30, 2026 Presidential Determination, which identified recovery of critical materials already in circulation as a national defense and supply security priority, was followed so quickly by a ribbon-cutting at a recycling plant rather than a groundbreaking at a new mine.
Under Secretary Kimmitt framed the stakes plainly at the ceremony: "You can't expect to lead in the technologies of tomorrow without reliable access to the foundational materials that make those technologies possible." That formulation, coming from the senior trade official of the U.S. Department of Commerce at a recycling facility in suburban Phoenix, captures the extent to which the rare earth supply conversation has moved in the past 18 months.
Hub-and-Spoke Strategy: Mesa, Kingston, and the South Carolina Campus
The Mesa facility is the first commercial-scale node in what Cyclic Materials is building as a national hub-and-spoke infrastructure for rare earth recovery. In the company's framework, Spokes are MagCycle separation plants that receive diverse feedstocks and produce Mag-Xtract concentrate. Hubs are REEPure refining facilities that convert Mag-Xtract into high-purity recycled Mixed Rare Earth Oxides ready for magnet manufacturing. The Kingston facility currently serves as the only operating Hub, processing material from both the Kingston R&D operations and, going forward, the Mesa Spoke.
The second U.S. facility, announced on January 29, 2026, will be located at the Alligator Industrial Park in McBee, South Carolina, in Chesterfield County. It represents a departure from the pure Spoke model: the $82 million campus will co-locate MagCycle separation and REEPure refining on a single site, making it both Cyclic's largest U.S. Spoke and its largest Hub. At initial operation in 2028, the South Carolina campus will process 2,000 metric tons of magnet material annually and produce 600 metric tons per year of Mixed Rare Earth Oxide, with planned expansion to 6,000 metric tons of magnet input and 1,800 metric tons of MREO output. That expanded production level is equivalent to the rare earth elements needed for approximately six million hybrid vehicle transmissions per year.
A key element of the South Carolina campus's commercial foundation is a 10-year exclusive agreement with Vacuumschmelze (VAC), the German magnet manufacturer whose Sumter, South Carolina facility began operations at the end of 2025. Under the agreement, Cyclic will recycle 100 percent of the magnet production byproducts, or swarf, generated at the VAC Sumter plant. That arrangement provides a guaranteed, high-quality feedstock stream from a domestic manufacturing partner while simultaneously addressing VAC's own circular economy obligations. Ghahreman described the South Carolina strategy as "a deliberate approach to grow a strong, interconnected U.S. recycling network" that positions Cyclic closer to partners, customers, and the talent pools needed to scale at a national level.
Groundbreaking at the South Carolina campus is planned for the fourth quarter of 2026, meaning the company intends to have two U.S. facilities under active development simultaneously by the end of this year. The 90 to 92 highly skilled jobs the campus is expected to create make it, in the words of the South Carolina Department of Commerce, one of the largest manufacturing commitments in Chesterfield County's history. State-level support includes job development credits from the Coordinating Council for Economic Development and a $500,000 Set-Aside grant to Chesterfield County for building improvements.
Funding, Investors, and the Commercial Ecosystem Taking Shape
The Mesa opening came 13 days after Cyclic Materials closed a $75 million strategic growth round led by accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, bringing the company's total equity funding to $237 million. The round also brought in Electronic Recyclers International (ERI) as a new strategic investor, a partnership with direct operational implications: ERI operates eight U.S. processing facilities and manages one of the largest electronics collection networks in the country. Through the partnership, ERI will identify, secure, and pre-process products containing rare earth magnets across its existing collection infrastructure, effectively extending Cyclic's feedstock reach to markets and geographies well beyond the Southwest.
The investor base assembled around Cyclic Materials reflects the breadth of industrial sectors with a stake in rare earth supply security. Current investors include Amazon, BMW i Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, Hitachi Ventures, Jaguar Land Rover, Microsoft, T. Rowe Price, and ERI. The combination of automotive companies, technology firms, climate-focused funds, and now a major electronics recycler signals that feedstock security, not just technology novelty, is driving capital into the company. Vineet Khanna, Investment Analyst at T. Rowe Price, characterized the rationale directly: "Our continued investment reflects our confidence in the company's ability to scale domestic rare earth recycling and production infrastructure for use across critical U.S. industries and technologies."
Global rare earth demand is projected to triple by 2035, driven primarily by electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, AI computing hardware, robotics, defense systems, and advanced consumer electronics. Against that demand trajectory, the current state of rare earth recycling is striking in its inadequacy: less than one percent of rare earth elements are recycled globally today. That gap represents both the market opportunity Cyclic is pursuing and the scale of the infrastructure buildout still required. The company's CEO put the commercial case succinctly at the Mesa grand opening: "Cyclic is quickly closing gaps in the domestic supply chain as we expedite our rare earth and critical mineral infrastructure development in the U.S. This means shaving months, if not years, off the delivery of the critical materials required to drive AI, energy, and defense sectors forward."
The feedstock pipeline that supports the Mesa facility is already substantially larger than the 7,000 metric tons delivered before opening day. Commercial partnerships secured through the ERI agreement and other arrangements give Cyclic a secured supply network that analysts describe as one of the most developed among rare earth recyclers anywhere operating outside China.
Conclusion: What the Mesa Facility Represents for U.S. Rare Earth Strategy
The Mesa opening is a concrete rather than merely symbolic development. A facility that can process 25,000 metric tons of magnet-bearing materials per year at eight tonnes per hour is not a pilot plant or a technology demonstration; it is a commercial operation with secured feedstock, paying customers, and first shipments expected this month. In that sense, it answers a specific and immediate criticism that has followed U.S. critical minerals policy for years: that the government and private sector have excelled at funding studies, launching programs, and announcing plans while leaving the processing capacity gap largely intact.
That said, the Mesa facility is a Spoke, not a Hub. Mag-Xtract produced in Arizona will travel to Kingston, Ontario for REEPure refining until the South Carolina campus comes online in 2028. The rare earth oxides that emerge from that refining process must then reach magnet manufacturers capable of producing finished NdFeB magnets at the volumes U.S. industry actually needs. As I reported in September 2026 when analyzing the Pentagon's offtake agreement with Serra Verde and MP Materials' first commercial magnet shipments, the Western supply chain is more integrated than it was two years ago but is still missing critical links between feedstock recovery, oxide production, and magnet manufacturing at domestic scale.
The November 10, 2026 expiration of China's suspension of its October 2025 export controls looms as a potential inflection point. If Beijing resumes those controls, the pressure on U.S. manufacturers to locate domestic or allied sources for dysprosium and terbium, the heavy rare earths that give NdFeB magnets their high-temperature performance in automotive and defense applications, will intensify sharply. Cyclic's Mesa facility and its planned South Carolina campus are sized and positioned to absorb a meaningful portion of that demand through the recycling channel. Whether they can scale quickly enough to matter before the next supply disruption is the question that will define the next chapter of this story.
What the Mesa opening demonstrates unambiguously is that the recycling pathway to rare earth supply security is no longer theoretical. The technology works at commercial scale, the feedstock is available, the customers exist, and the capital is flowing. The remaining challenge is execution at the pace and volume that the geopolitical situation demands, a challenge Cyclic Materials has set itself a very public timeline to meet.