John Maslin spent years in the Navy's nuclear reactor program before pivoting to Harvard Business School—a trajectory that doesn't typically lead to manufacturing. Yet on November 3, 2025, the former officer found himself at the center of a $1.4 billion wager that the United States could, after decades of offshoring, rebuild the industrial capacity to make the magnets inside everything from F-35 guidance systems to electric vehicle motors.
His company, Vulcan Elements, had been around for barely 18 months when it announced the public-private partnership on November 3, 2025. The deal tied together Pentagon loans, Commerce Department equity, and a still-in-progress private fundraise to build what would become one of the largest rare earth permanent magnet facilities outside China—a 10,000-metric-tonne-per-year plant in Benson, North Carolina. If it works, the facility could reshape America's dependence on a material that Beijing has quietly dominated for a generation.
The funding architecture is complex, perhaps deliberately so. Vulcan secured a $620 million conditional loan from the Defense Department's Office of Strategic Capital. ReElement Technologies, a partner supplying rare earth oxides, got another $80 million. The Commerce Department's CHIPS Program dangled a $50 million equity investment—though as of the announcement, that remained a non-binding letter of intent. Vulcan itself needed to raise $550 million in private capital to close the gap. By March 2026, according to Axios Pro, that last piece was still coming together.
The 94% Problem
Here's the dependency in a number: China manufactured approximately 94% of the world's sintered neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets in 2024, per data from the International Energy Agency. These aren't obscure industrial inputs. They're high-performance magnets—the kind that make wind turbines efficient, drone propulsion possible, and advanced weapons systems viable. U.S. policymakers have been flagging the concentration risk for years, usually in strongly worded reports that gather dust. Vulcan's backers think they can do something about it.
Maslin co-founded the company in 2023 with Dr. Piotr Kulik, a magnetics professor who claims to have opened the first U.S. rare earth magnetics lab in two decades. That's a hard claim to verify, but it underscores how far American expertise atrophied. By March 2025, the pair had commissioned a 21,000-square-foot pilot facility in Research Triangle Park. Eight months later came the Benson announcement.
The speed raises eyebrows—startups don't usually go from lab benches to billion-dollar industrial projects in less than two years. But Maslin had momentum. The company raised a $65 million Series A in August 2025, led by Altimeter Capital with significant backing from One Investment Management, the vehicle run by Rajeev Misra, SoftBank's former chief investment officer. Axios pegged the valuation around $250 million, though whether that was pre- or post-money went unspecified. By mid-May 2026, Vulcan's LinkedIn listed "nearly 100 people," 90% of them engineers, scientists, or technicians—a ratio that suggests the company is still very much in build mode.
Johnston County, Population 220,000
The Benson site sits in Johnston County, about 35 miles southeast of Raleigh in an area North Carolina designates as Tier 3—economically distressed, in state parlance. The $918.1 million capital investment will create 1,000 jobs, according to Governor Josh Stein, who announced the site selection on November 18, 2025. The state offered a performance-based incentive package worth up to $17.5 million over 12 years, contingent on Vulcan hitting hiring and wage targets. A separate $3.6 million workforce grant from the Golden LEAF Foundation will fund training programs at Johnston Community College, with classes scheduled to start in summer 2026.
Whether those jobs materialize depends on execution. Maslin told Axios in August 2025 that Vulcan had already secured contracts with the Navy, Army, and Air Force, with initial deliveries that month—a timeline that suggests the pilot facility was doing more than R&D.
Assembling the Chain
Vulcan isn't just building a factory. It's trying to assemble a domestic oxide-to-magnet supply chain, stitching together upstream partners in what amounts to an industrial jigsaw puzzle. In August 2025, the company finalized a long-term supply agreement with ReElement for rare earth oxides. It added memoranda of understanding with Energy Fuels (targeting Q4 2025 deliveries of separated oxides) and Ucore Rare Metals (commercial-scale neodymium-praseodymium and dysprosium oxides beginning in 2027, tied to Ucore's Louisiana separation facility and an Alaska mining project).
The government support reflects Washington's urgency, or at least its willingness to throw capital at the problem. The $620 million Office of Strategic Capital loan to Vulcan and the $80 million to ReElement were described as "conditional loan commitments" in November 2025 reporting by Defense Daily and Bloomberg Law. As of mid-2026, no final closing documents had surfaced on defense.gov, suggesting terms were still being negotiated—or renegotiated.
A Crowded Field
Vulcan isn't the only company trying to revive U.S. magnet production. MP Materials began trial production of automotive-grade sintered NdFeB magnets at its Fort Worth facility in January 2025, targeting roughly 1,000 tonnes per year. Noveon Magnetics in Austin signed a supply agreement with ABB in August 2025 for motors bound for North American operations. USA Rare Earth commissioned a production line in Oklahoma in early 2026 and landed a $1.6 billion CHIPS letter of intent that same month.
What distinguishes Vulcan—at least on paper—is scale. The 10,000-tonne Benson facility would dwarf competitors if it hits capacity, a big if in an industry notorious for overpromising. Maslin's pitch is vertical integration: control the supply chain from oxide to finished magnet, and you eliminate the dependencies that have made U.S. defense contractors beholden to Chinese suppliers.
The 1789 Capital Question
Politics, inevitably, have intruded. Reports surfaced in December 2025 that 1789 Capital—a firm co-founded by Donald Trump Jr.—participated in Vulcan's Series A, raising obvious questions as a Defense Department loan moved forward. The company hasn't confirmed the full investor roster beyond Altimeter and One Investment Management, and these reports remain unverified. Still, the optics are awkward.
Vulcan claims all project milestones remain on time and on budget, the sort of statement every startup makes until it doesn't. Workforce training at Johnston Community College is set to begin this summer, with production-employee programs running through December 2030. The $550 million private raise, if it closes, would complete the financing stack. The company's mission, spelled out plainly on its website, is to build a domestic, vertically integrated rare earth magnet supply chain decoupled from China.
Whether the capital, contracts, and industrial execution align to deliver that in Benson—rather than becoming another cautionary tale about reshoring ambitions—will determine if the $1.4 billion bet was visionary or just expensive. Maslin has 18 months and a hundred engineers to prove it can be done. China, which has spent three decades perfecting the process, will be watching.
