Before the factory with hundreds of workers, before the major deals with iPhone maker Apple and the federal government, employees at MP Materials worked out of a warehouse behind a 7-Eleven north of Fort Worth.
It was 2021, the year after Covid-19 temporarily shut down the world and many people navigated life wearing face masks. The Las Vegas-based rare earth magnet maker was founded when executives purchased a rare earth mine in Mountain Pass, California, in 2017. It went public in 2020 with the goal of restoring an industry dominated by China to the U.S.
They hadn’t made a magnet yet — or even had the full capacity of employees to make them. Executives such as Alan Lund, executive vice president of magnetics , knew they had to start somewhere. So they rented a four-bay warehouse and office in an industrial park called Bobcat Corners at 1741 N. U.S. Highway in 377 in Roanoke. They got to work laying the foundations for what was to come.
“If we just sat and waited until the building was ready to make a first magnet and to really understand how to make a magnet, we would fail,” Lund said.
Late in 2021, the company announced its biggest contract yet, with automaker General Motors Co. to produce magnets for its electric motors.
MP executives later chose a site in northern Fort Worth, about a 12-minute drive away at 13840 Independence Pkwy. in Alliance, for their first full-fledged factory.
But choosing Fort Worth was never a given.
MP Materials (NYSE: MP) is headquartered in Las Vegas because the city is 45 northeast of its Mountain Pass mine. For magnet production, executives needed a place where industrial infrastructure, workforce and logistics were available. Lund said they put together a spreadsheet with dozens of criteria and narrowed it down to a handful of sites. Fort Worth stood out for the ability to build something fast compared with other parts of the country.
It also helped that the billionaire chairman of Hillwood, Ross Perot Jr., was in the company’s corner, MP Materials CEO James Litinsky said.
“We needed all the help we could get.” he said. “Ross was an incredible partner from the beginning,” Litinsky said.
Perot said he caught wind that MP Materials was looking to build a factory, and connected Litinsky to Gov. Greg Abbott. Together they sold Litinsky on locating in Texas.
Of the estimated 602 companies that call the 27,000-acre Alliance development home, Perot said MP is one of the most significant to come to the area in recent years, citing national security. Everything from electric engines to F-35 fighter jets use powerful rare earth magnets. But China dominates the supply chain, accounting for 60% of global mined production of magnet rare earths and 94% of sintered permanent magnets, according to an International Energy Agency report.
The U.S. Department of Defense is MP Materials’ largest shareholder after a multibillion public-private partnership reached in 2025.
“I tell our team, this is a Manhattan Project,” Perot said. “This thing is beyond critical to the nation.”
Five years later, the parking lot of MP Materials’ Alliance factory is full of cars. More than 350 employees work at the factory and Lund said that could grow to more than 2,000 as production ramps up. Inside, materials extracted from the California are turned into a powder-like material called neodymium-praseodymium oxide. The material is turned into metal ingots, then into metal flakes in a strip caster, then processed into a powder and eventually formed into a small metal square. The magnets come out unmagnetized — human hands cannot lift the magnet from a metal surface. General Motors will magnetize them during assembly.
There were about 112 job openings in Fort Worth posted on MP Materials’ website as of Sept. 29, ranging from machinists to laboratory technicians. The company recently delivered its first magnets to General Motors (Nasdaq: GM) and is scheduled to start commercial shipments of magnets to the company by the end of the year.
As people work with machinery on the factory floor and in labs to produce the magnets, other parts of the factory are a construction zone. MP Materials is preparing to make magnets for Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) as part of a $500 million contract.
About 10 miles away from Independence, construction is ongoing for the company’s 1.2-million-square-foot campus called 10X in Northlake. The campus will allow MP Materials to scale up production as part of a partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense, remanded as the Department of War.