Project Swarm: Sovereign Airspace Requires a Sovereign Supply Chain
America cannot achieve drone dominance while depending on foreign-controlled supply chains
The future will move through the air.
Drones are rapidly changing the character of warfare while transforming logistics, infrastructure, emergency response, and transportation. The technologies powering autonomous aircraft today will ultimately enable entirely new forms of human flight.
The nation that can design, manufacture, and deploy these systems at scale will possess one of the defining economic and strategic advantages of the 21st century.
America has many of the ingredients required to lead. We have world-class capabilities in artificial intelligence, autonomy, sensing, communications, and mission systems.
But software does not fly by itself.
Every drone is built on a physical industrial base: batteries, semiconductors, power electronics, motors, actuators, and rare earth permanent magnets. The drone race will not be won solely by the country with the best technology stack. It will be won by the country that can manufacture the entire system reliably, securely, and at scale.
The industrial base beneath the drone economy
Rare earth magnets are among the smallest components in a drone, but they are also among the most consequential. They enable electric motors and actuators to deliver the power, efficiency, and precision that make advanced electric flight possible.
Small quantities become strategically significant at scale. Using an illustrative assumption of 50 grams of magnet content per drone, one million drones represent roughly 50 metric tons of magnet demand. This is not a niche end market. Drones are poised to become one of the largest and most important consumers of high-performance rare earth magnets in the world.
Yet the supply chain supporting them remains overwhelmingly concentrated in China. That dependency extends beyond materials and components and into the drone market itself. A single Chinese drone manufacturer commands more than half of U.S. commercial market share.
This is not dependency at the margin. It is structural dependency.
The warning has already been delivered
The United States government has increasingly recognized this risk. The White House has prioritized domestic drone production and supply-chain resilience. The FCC has moved to restrict certain foreign-produced drones, robots, and critical components. Beginning in 2027, DFARS requirements for NdFeB magnets expand to encompass the entire supply chain.
These policies are necessary. But drone dominance cannot be regulated into existence. It must be manufactured.
The coordination problem
For American and allied drone manufacturers, securing a domestic magnet supply chain presents a unique challenge. The industry is fragmented across hundreds of innovative companies, each advancing rapidly evolving technologies with requirements that vary by platform. Production volumes are modest during development, then shift quickly as programs mature.
To a drone manufacturer, magnets are mission critical. To a magnet producer, however, that same requirement may appear as a relatively small, highly specialized order.
This mismatch makes the industry difficult to serve through conventional industrial models. Large automotive and consumer-electronics manufacturers can secure dedicated capacity through substantial, long-term volume commitments. Most drone manufacturers, despite their strategic importance, cannot create that scale or certainty on their own. Yet collectively they represent one of the most strategically important industries in the world.
The challenge is not demand. It is coordination.
Introducing Project Swarm
Today, MP Materials is launching Project Swarm.
Project Swarm is an industrial coordination initiative designed to aggregate the future rare earth magnet requirements of U.S. and allied drone and motor manufacturers. By aggregating demand across the industry, Project Swarm creates the scale and long-term visibility needed to reserve future production capacity, accelerate standardization, and build a durable domestic supply chain.
Through Project Swarm, participating manufacturers can reserve future production capacity from MP Materials' 10X magnet manufacturing facility, which we are developing in Northlake, Texas, in partnership with the U.S. Department of War.
Unlike a traditional supply agreement, Project Swarm allows participants to reserve future production capacity without making binding purchase commitments today. As technologies mature and production programs evolve, participants can refine their requirements while retaining priority access to domestic supply.
This approach gives manufacturers the flexibility they need during a period of rapid technological change while providing MP Materials with the demand visibility needed to invest in manufacturing capacity years before it is required. Participants will also gain access to MP's engineering team to optimize magnet designs and may receive preferential opportunities to secure earlier production from our Independence facility in Fort Worth.
By aligning future demand across the industry, Project Swarm enables manufacturers to share strategic industrial infrastructure that no single company could efficiently build alone. The result is a stronger, more resilient domestic supply chain capable of supporting millions of drones and other autonomous systems each year.
Built from the mine forward
Project Swarm is possible because MP Materials is rebuilding the supply chain from the mine forward. At Mountain Pass, we mine and refine rare earth materials. At our Texas facilities, we produce rare earth metals, alloys, and finished NdFeB magnets.
That means the supply chain can remain under American control through the critical stages of mining, separation, metallization, alloying, magnet manufacturing, finishing, and recycling. Project Swarm gives the drone industry a path to that capacity.
The swarm is forming
Multiple leading drone companies have already executed term sheets with MP Materials to participate in Project Swarm. Now, we want to engage the broader industry: drone manufacturers, motor manufacturers, propulsion developers, defense technology companies, commercial operators, and allied producers preparing for the next generation of autonomous aircraft.
MP Materials views this as one of the most important things we can do—not only for our company, but for America's security and industrial sovereignty.
Tomorrow, our Founder, Chairman and CEO, James Litinsky, will speak at the American Drone Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. We will be there to listen to the industry, meet with manufacturers, and advance this effort.
