The Rare Earth Race Has a New Front-Runner

Rhea-AI Summary

As the U.S. rushes to build a non-Chinese rare earth supply chain, multiple companies are advancing new strategies. Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) is highlighted for its role in rare earth recycling from hard disk drives.

In April 2025, Western Digital completed an at-scale pilot with Microsoft, Critical Materials Recycling, and PedalPoint Recycling, processing about 50,000 pounds of shredded end-of-life HDDs using an environmentally friendly, non-acid extraction method. The process recovered rare earth oxides along with gold, copper, aluminum, and steel. Western Digital views this model as a blueprint to transform global HDD recycling and potentially reduce U.S. reliance on virgin rare earth mining by feeding recovered materials back into the domestic supply chain.

AI-generated analysis. Not financial advice.

Key Figures

Phase One capex: $75 million Allocated cash: $50 million Apple partnership: $500 million +5 more

8 metrics

Phase One capex $75 million Capital required for REalloys’ Phase One buildout

Allocated cash $50 million Cash already allocated to REalloys’ Phase One buildout

Apple partnership $500 million Apple’s 2025 partnership with MP Materials for recycled rare earth magnets

REalloys price target $35 Clear Street target when stock traded just under $8

Offtake term 15 years REalloys’ definitive offtake agreement with Critical Metals for Tanbreez

Phase 1 offtake share 15% Share of Tanbreez Phase 1 production contracted to REalloys

Heavy REE share 27% Estimated heavy rare earth portion of Tanbreez’s total profile

WDC HDD recycling pilot 50,000 pounds End-of-life hard drives processed in Western Digital’s pilot program

Market Reality Check

Price: $530.60 Vol: Volume 6,236,903 is below...

normal vol

$530.60 Last Close

Volume Volume 6,236,903 is below 20-day average 8,035,574 (relative volume 0.78x) ahead of this commentary. normal

Technical Price 530.60 is trading above the 200-day MA at 225.95, reflecting a strong pre‑news uptrend.

Peers on Argus

WDC was up 1.13% while close peers were mixed: STX -1.19%, PSTG +3.61%, HPQ +4.5...

1 Up

WDC was up 1.13% while close peers were mixed: STX -1.19%, PSTG +3.61%, HPQ +4.51%, SMCI -0.26%, LOGI +0.18%. Scanner momentum only flagged DELL at about +3%, indicating stock‑specific rather than broad sector flow.

Common Catalyst Same‑day peer headlines center on SMCI’s collaboration with Taiwanese authorities and STX’s exchangeable notes transaction, separate from the rare earth supply-chain focus of this article.

Historical Context

5 past events · Latest: May 20 (Positive)

Pattern 5 events

Date	Event	Sentiment	Move	Catalyst
May 20	AI survey insights	Positive	+1.1%	Customer survey showed strong demand for scalable, cost‑efficient AI storage.
May 18	AI security launch	Positive	-4.8%	Introduced Ultrastar drives with post‑quantum cryptography for AI data trust.
May 14	ESG index inclusion	Positive	-1.0%	Added to 2026 S&P Dow Jones Best‑in‑Class Index for sustainability leadership.
May 06	Equity exchange	Neutral	+3.9%	Announced exchange of Sandisk shares for WDC equity to adjust holdings.
Apr 30	Earnings Q3 FY26	Positive	-0.7%	Reported strong revenue, margins, EPS and raised dividend and guidance.

Pattern Detected

Recent history shows WDC sometimes selling off on positive news (e.g., AI drive launch, index inclusion, strong earnings), with only one clear positive-news day producing an immediate gain.

Recent Company History

Over the last month, WDC news has focused on AI storage positioning, ESG recognition, capital structure, and strong earnings. AI-related updates on May 18 and May 20 highlighted secure, scalable infrastructure, while the May 14 index inclusion underscored sustainability leadership. An equity‑for‑equity exchange on May 6 and solid Q3 FY2026 results on April 30 rounded out a fundamentally strong narrative. Against that backdrop, today’s rare earth–focused commentary mentions WDC’s recycling pilot as part of a broader strategic supply‑chain theme.

Market Pulse Summary

This announcement places Western Digital within a broader rare earth supply‑chain buildout by highli...

Analysis

This announcement places Western Digital within a broader rare earth supply‑chain buildout by highlighting its pilot program that processed about 50,000 pounds of end‑of‑life hard drives using a non‑acid extraction method. That positions WDC as a contributor to recycled rare earth feedstock alongside mining and processing players. In context with recent AI and infrastructure news, investors may watch how effectively WDC scales this recycling blueprint and integrates recovered materials into the U.S. supply chain.

Key Terms

rare earth oxides, NdFeB

2 terms

rare earth oxides technical

"The company's Euclid, Ohio, operation focuses on ... converting rare earth oxides into defense-grade metals"

Rare earth oxides are compounds formed when rare earth elements combine with oxygen, creating powders or solids used as the raw ingredients for critical components like strong magnets, catalysts, display phosphors and some battery materials. They matter to investors because these materials are essential to many high‑growth industries and their supply is often concentrated and hard to scale, so shortages, production changes or cost swings can quickly affect manufacturers’ profits and stock values.

NdFeB technical

"the world's most strongest and most advanced magnet: the NdFeB permanent magnet type used in missile systems"

NdFeB are neodymium-iron-boron permanent magnets — tiny but extremely strong magnets used inside electric motors, wind turbines, hard drives and many consumer devices. They matter to investors because their performance, cost and supply are driven by a small number of raw materials and producers; changes in rare-earth prices, trade policy or demand for electrification can quickly affect manufacturers’ costs, product competitiveness and company profits.

AI-generated analysis. Not financial advice.

FN Media Group Presents Oilprice.com Market Commentary

NEW YORK, May 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- As Washington races to build a rare earth supply chain that can survive the Pentagon's 2027 ban on Chinese-origin materials, REalloys (ALOY) has locked in long-term supply from one of the largest known heavy rare earth deposits in the world.  Companies mentioned in today's commentary includes:  Realloys Inc. (ALOY), Lynas Rare Earths Ltd. (OTCQX: LYSDY), Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Comstock Inc. (NYSE American: LODE).

The company announced last Thursday that it has signed a definitive 15-year offtake agreement with Critical Metals Corp. covering 15% of Phase 1 production from the Tanbreez project in southern Greenland, a massive heavy rare earth deposit containing Dysprosium and Terbium, the two most strategically sensitive magnet materials used in fighter aircraft, missile systems, radar platforms, drones, and advanced defense hardware.

REalloys is building one of the only integrated heavy rare earth metallization and magnet production platforms in North America as Washington pushes to break its dependence on Chinese processing capacity before the Pentagon ban takes effect in only seven months.

The company's Euclid, Ohio, operation focuses on the hardest part of the rare earth supply chain outside China: converting rare earth oxides into defense-grade metals, alloys, and eventually the world's most strongest and most advanced magnet: the NdFeB permanent magnet type used in missile systems, fighter aircraft, radar platforms, robotics, EV drivetrains, and advanced industrial systems. 

REalloys says it is scaling that Ohio platform into the largest heavy rare earth metallization facility outside China, supported by a growing network of allied-nation feedstock agreements.

The Tanbreez agreement significantly expands that network.

Under the deal, REalloys will secure 15% of monthly Phase 1 production from the Greenland project for an initial 15-year term. 

This is another major announcement for REalloys as the company rushes to stay ahead of major defense deadlines. 

The Tanbreez offtake deal follows REalloys strategic partnership with Saskatchewan Research Council  tied to 80% of the output from the Saskatchewan Research Council's commercial rare earth processing facility. It also adds to the company's previously-     secured rights to up to 10% of production from the high-grade Sheep Creek rare earth deposit in Montana, and its controls of the Hoidas Lake rare earth asset      in Saskatchewan. 

GREENLAND IS EMERGING AS A WESTERN RARE EARTH STRONGHOLD

Trump didn't manage to buy Greenland, but REalloys got its critical minerals. 

The strategic importance of the Tanbreez project goes far beyond scale. 

The Greenland deposit is one of the largest known heavy rare earth resources globally and one of the few major Western-aligned projects capable of supplying meaningful quantities of Dysprosium and Terbium outside China.

Tanbreez isn't just another rare earths venue. It's a heavy rare earth behemoth, while most global deposits focus on less valuable light rare earth production. Critical Metals estimates heavy rare earths account for roughly 27% of the project's total profile. Most global deposits focused primarily on light rare earth production.

The Greenland project is already fully permitted and advancing under a Western-aligned ownership structure following Greenland's approval of Critical Metals' acquisition of a controlling 92.5% interest earlier this year. 

For REalloys, the deal secures another long-term heavy rare earth materials now central to Pentagon supply chain planning amid a Middle East conflict that is rapidly depleting the arsenal. 

Johns Hopkins economists Steve Hanke and Jeffrey Weng told Fortune magazine that the U.S. has already burned through massive portions of its precision weapons inventory across Iran and Ukraine, while remaining dependent on Chinese-controlled rare earth materials to replace them. The economists suggest that Washington has blown through 45% of its Precision Strike Missile inventory just in Iran, and nearly 50% of its THAAD interceptors and 30% of its Tomahawk cruise missiles, among others. 

Those systems rely on samarium-cobalt magnets or dysprosium- and terbium-enhanced NdFeB magnets that still flow overwhelmingly through China's refining and metallization system. The authors estimate that replenishing just four major weapons systems could require between five and ten metric tons of finished defense-grade rare earth magnets, with more than 95% of current supply chains still tied to China.

And that's the gap REalloys is helping to close, with a North American solution helmed by       a leadership lineup that represents the who's who of American defense. 

Joe Kasper, former Chief of Staff to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, leads REalloys' advisory board, working closely with REalloys' Board Chair, Stephen duMont, president of GM Defense, and seated Board member, General Jack Keane, former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.              

These are the people who've run defense procurement from the inside, the ones who decide who gets qualified, who gets funded, and who actually ends up supplying material into weapons systems.

"This is about building a completely sovereign supply chain from input to finished product, without relying on foreign processing," Joe Kasper, former Chief of Staff to the U.S. Secretary of Defense and now Chairman of REalloys' advisory board, told Oilprice.com. "If the U.S. can't access domestically-processed and manufactured materials, then it does not have a rare earths supply chain at all."

All Systems Go

REalloys' Phase One operations are already turning rare earths into alloys in Ohio, amid an ongoing build-out that will launch next year alongside the Pentagon ban on Chinese-origin rare earths, its plans for Phase Two are a major scale-up.  

In Phase One, REalloys intends to move into North American production of high-purity rare earth oxides that can be turned into metals and alloys, using a mix of recycled magnets and mined feedstock. This is the point at which material is produced in the United States and can move through a traceable supply chain. The capital required is about $75 million, and the buildout has $50 million in cash already allocated. 

By Phase Two, it will all run through the Ohio facility, where REalloys already converts rare earth oxides into metal and alloy form. The buildout increases throughput and expands the range of material it can process, including heavy rare earths like Dysprosium and Terbium. Feedstock is expected to come from both recycled magnets and upstream feedstock supply agreements, like the one from the Tanbreez project, with the material moving through reduction and alloying in-house before leaving as finished product.

Phase Two will also vertically integrate by adding rare earths magnet production to the pipeline. By 2029, the plan is to add magnet manufacturing in Ohio, closing the full circle from processed material into finished components.

Instead of selling metal and alloys into someone else's system, REalloys would produce NdFeB magnets itself from its own integrated solution and keep that margin. 

This is where the economics takes a major leap forward, and it's what prompted Clears Street in April to launch coverage of REalloys

Clear Street initiated coverage of REalloys with a Buy rating and a $35 price target, even though the stock was trading just under $8 at the time of the report, because the current valuation does not reflect what the system could look like once it's running at scale.

The Rare Earths End Game

Rare earths are now facing tightening restrictions on both sides of the Pacific. 

And Washington is scrambling to the point of internal divisions over how fast this entire supply chain can be built. 

Bloomberg reports that internal disagreements are emerging inside the Trump administration after China's export restrictions exposed major U.S. vulnerabilities. The argument is over whether the U.S. should rely on market forces to rebuild the rare earth industry or use aggressive state-backed financing and industrial policy similar to the model China used to dominate the sector.

This is why companies capable of securing even a single strategic link in the non-Chinese rare earth supply chain could become some of the most valuable industrial and defense assets of the next decade.

Other companies looking to influence the rare earth supply chain:

Lynas Rare Earths Ltd. (LYSDY) remains the leading producer of separated rare earth materials outside China. The company has restructured its processing chain to mitigate regulatory risk and expand long-term throughput.

The Kalgoorlie cracking and leaching plant in Western Australia is fully operational, allowing Mt Weld concentrate to be processed domestically and radioactive residues to be managed before shipment. This shift has enhanced supply security while addressing prior Malaysian regulatory concerns.

Apple (AAPL) has emerged as the clear leader among big tech companies in rare earth magnet recycling, having pioneered the use of recycled rare earth elements in consumer electronics as far back as 2019, when it introduced them in the Taptic Engine of the iPhone 11. Today, nearly all magnets across Apple's device lineup are made with 100% recycled rare earth elements, a milestone the company has nearly achieved across its entire portfolio.

In July 2025, Apple formalized its commitment with a landmark $500 million partnership with MP Materials, the only fully integrated rare earth producer in the United States, to source American-made recycled rare earth magnets for hundreds of millions of Apple devices.

Western Digital (WDC), one of the world's largest hard disk drive manufacturers, has taken a leading role in developing scalable rare earth recovery from its own products at end of life. In April 2025, Western Digital announced a successful at-scale pilot program conducted in collaboration with Microsoft, Critical Materials Recycling, and PedalPoint Recycling, in which approximately 50,000 pounds of shredded end-of-life hard drives were processed using an environmentally friendly, non-acid chemical extraction method to recover rare earth oxides alongside gold, copper, aluminum, and steel.

Western Digital views this initiative as a blueprint for transforming the global HDD recycling industry, with the potential to significantly offset U.S. dependence on virgin rare earth mining when scaled worldwide. By partnering with downstream processors and data center operators, Western Digital is helping to establish a feedstock network that feeds recovered rare earths back into the U.S. supply chain.

Alphabet (GOOGL) is the "automated chemist" of the rare earth industry. Through Google DeepMind, they released GNoME, an AI tool that has predicted over 2 million new crystalline structures. This isn't just a science experiment; researchers are currently using this database to find "rare-earth-free" permanent magnets.

The company's stock remains a cornerstone of the tech market, with Google Cloud seeing explosive growth as it becomes the preferred home for many generative AI startups. Google Cloud is also the digital backbone for the Saskatchewan Research Council's new rare earth separation facility, providing the computer vision and AI models needed to automate the complex process of separating the 17 chemically identical rare earth elements.

Every other company on this list is trying to dig something out of the ground. Comstock Inc. (LODE) is going a different direction: recovering critical metals from the mountain of end-of-life solar panels that's about to hit the U.S. market.

Comstock Metals, the company's Nevada-based subsidiary, is building what it describes as the only certified zero-landfill solar recycling solution in North America. Its first industry-scale facility in Silver Springs, Nevada is commissioning now, designed to process up to 100,000 tons—approximately 3.3 million panels—per year. A second site in Clark County is in permitting.

By. Charles Kennedy

Oilprice Intelligence brings you the inside view on where the next gains will come from, breaking down the market's biggest growth driver with analysis from veteran oilmen and experts. Click here to get this crucial intel for free

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FAQ

What rare earth recycling initiative did Western Digital (WDC) announce in April 2025?

Western Digital announced an at-scale pilot recycling program processing about 50,000 pounds of shredded end-of-life hard drives. The collaboration recovered rare earth oxides plus gold, copper, aluminum, and steel using a non-acid chemical extraction method, demonstrating a scalable model for HDD materials recovery.

How does Western Digital's (WDC) rare earth recovery pilot work?

The pilot processes shredded end-of-life hard drives with an environmentally friendly, non-acid chemical extraction method. This approach recovers rare earth oxides and several valuable metals, suggesting a pathway to industrial-scale HDD recycling that could feed recovered rare earths back into U.S. supply chains.

Why is Western Digital's (WDC) HDD recycling program important for the U.S. rare earth supply chain?

Western Digital sees its HDD recycling initiative as a blueprint for global HDD recycling. According to Western Digital, scaling this model could significantly offset U.S. dependence on virgin rare earth mining by creating a steady recycled feedstock for domestic processors and manufacturers.

Who partnered with Western Digital (WDC) on its April 2025 rare earth recycling pilot?

Western Digital ran the pilot in collaboration with Microsoft, Critical Materials Recycling, and PedalPoint Recycling. These partners helped process roughly 50,000 pounds of end-of-life hard drives, validating the non-acid extraction method and supporting creation of a broader feedstock network for recovered rare earths.

How could Western Digital's (WDC) recycling blueprint impact the global HDD recycling industry?

Western Digital views the pilot as a template to transform global HDD recycling. According to Western Digital, broader adoption could standardize non-acid rare earth extraction, increase recovery of critical metals from retired drives, and strengthen circular supply chains for rare earth materials worldwide.