Cyclic Materials Raises $75M as DPA Backs US Rare Earth Recycling

Cyclic Materials closed a $75 million financing round on 27 August 2026, positioning the Canadian-founded rare earth recycler at the centre of Washington’s effort to build domestic control over critical mineral supply. The capital accelerates construction of an integrated recycling campus in McBee, South Carolina, designed to process 6,000 metric tonnes of magnet feedstock a year, with a groundbreaking targeted before the end of 2026.

Rare earth elements are the permanent magnet materials that make electric vehicle motors, defence systems, wind turbines, and advanced electronics function. Foreign processing facilities handle the overwhelming majority of U.S. rare earth supply, leaving the country with limited domestic capacity for these materials. A presidential directive issued on 30 July 2026 under the Defense Production Act placed end-of-life rare earth magnets and scrap containing critical minerals into the category of materials essential to national defence, shifting US rare earth recycling from an environmental initiative into a supply chain security instrument backed by regulatory authority.

Here is what the latest capital raise means in concrete terms: where the money goes, why a major electronics recycler joined the round, what the McBee campus will actually produce, and what the new presidential directive changes for investors tracking domestic critical minerals supply.

What the $75 million buys and why T. Rowe Price came back

This financing brings Cyclic Materials’ total equity raised to $237 million since the company’s founding. Capital is earmarked for two deployment targets: accelerated construction at the McBee, South Carolina campus and expansion of the company’s hub-and-spoke recycling network across the United States. CEO and founder Ahmad Ghahreman stated the funding enables faster construction activity in South Carolina and accelerated network growth.

The lead investor is the detail that carries the most weight. T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. led the round through accounts it advises. The firm made its initial commitment to Cyclic Materials in 2025 and has now led multiple successive financing rounds.

T. Rowe Price investment analyst Vineet Khanna described Cyclic Materials as a market leader in rare earth recovery, citing continued commercial progress, U.S. geographic expansion, and supply chain partnerships as reasons for sustained investor confidence.

An institutional manager of T. Rowe Price’s scale does not re-enter positions casually. Leading a second round into the same company tells investors that the funding thesis has survived internal underwriting scrutiny more than once, which is a materially different signal than a first-time commitment from a new institutional name. This is capital being deployed as long-duration infrastructure conviction, not a speculative cleantech bet.

Inside the McBee campus: capacity, timeline, and what it will actually produce

Cyclic Materials will invest more than $82 million to build a rare earth recycling campus at Alligator Industrial Park in McBee, South Carolina. The facility is designed as the company’s most integrated U.S. site, co-locating two distinct processing stages on a single campus.

The first stage is a spoke facility where the MagCycle process, the company’s proprietary pre-processing technology, pulls magnet-rich concentrate out of mixed, multi-material waste streams. The second stage is a hub facility running the REEPure hydrometallurgical process, which takes that concentrated feedstock and refines it into mixed rare earth oxides (MREO), the oxide-form output that can re-enter permanent magnet supply chains directly.

Hydrometallurgical processing, the chemistry class that REEPure belongs to, separates rare earth elements from concentrated feedstock through aqueous chemical reactions, producing oxide-form outputs that can re-enter permanent magnet alloy production without the full complexity of primary ore refining.

Both stages sitting on one campus means feedstock arrives at McBee and leaves as usable oxide product, without requiring intermediate transport to a separate processing site.

The capacity build is phased, not all-at-once:

Groundbreaking is targeted for Q4 2026, with operations expected around 2028. At 1,800 tonnes of MREO per year at full expansion, McBee is not large enough to reshape the global rare earth market. It is large enough to provide a meaningful increment of immediately deployable domestic supply that bypasses the decade-scale timelines of new mining projects, and its output arrives within reach of near-term domestic content requirements facing EV and defence manufacturers.

ERI’s role as investor and feedstock supplier closes the loop on supply security

Processing capacity is only as bankable as the feedstock flowing into it. For any recycler scaling up, the primary gating factor is not the chemistry or the capital; it is whether incoming material is reliable, geographically aligned, and contracted in advance of facility commissioning. Without that, a hub is an expensive building waiting for supply.

ERI, an electronics recycler operating nationwide, came into the August 2026 round as a newly committed strategic investor. The investment followed a partnership established between ERI and Cyclic Materials in July 2026, meaning the operational relationship preceded the capital commitment. ERI’s functional roles in the partnership address the feedstock constraint directly:

• Nationwide collection infrastructure to source end-of-life products containing rare earth magnets
• Identification and pre-processing of magnet-bearing materials from complex electronic waste
• Feedstock delivery to Cyclic Materials’ recovery network ahead of hub commissioning

Ahmad Ghahreman, CEO of Cyclic Materials, stated the funding enables faster U.S. network growth, a direct reference to the supply-side build-out that partnerships like ERI’s make possible.

The structural significance here is that an investor who is also contractually positioned as your primary feedstock supplier has aligned incentives across both financial upside and operational success. That is a different relationship than a financial-only strategic investor. Feedstock supply is being locked in ahead of McBee’s 2028 operations target, which is the sequence investors in recycling infrastructure need to see.

Cyclic Materials’ Mesa, Arizona spoke facility entered its commissioning phase with operations targeted for Q3 2026, establishing the company’s first U.S. operational presence before the larger McBee campus comes online.

For readers wanting a deeper breakdown of how the supply agreement is structured, our full explainer on the Cyclic Materials and ERI partnership covers the collection logistics, feedstock identification process, and contractual framework that precedes the McBee commissioning window.

How the 30 July presidential directive changes the policy floor for domestic recyclers

On 30 July 2026, the White House issued a Presidential Determination under Section 101 of the Defense Production Act. The determination declared “recoverable critical minerals and materials” scarce and essential to national defence, and delegated authority to the Secretary of Commerce to issue regulations, guidance, and potential export controls to secure their supply.

The Defense Production Act has been invoked across multiple supply chain categories in 2026, establishing a pattern of executive authority that treats domestic industrial capacity as a national security instrument rather than a commercial policy question.

The specific material categories covered under the determination include:

• Black mass (the processed output of shredded batteries and electronics)
• End-of-life rare earth permanent magnets
• Swarf (fine metallic waste generated during magnet manufacturing)
• Other waste and scrap containing critical minerals and materials
• Copper scrap is explicitly excluded, covered under a separate proclamation

What the export control delegation means for investors

The Commerce Department’s delegated authority is the detail to track most closely. If regulations restricting the export of black mass or rare earth magnet scrap are issued, the competitive position of domestic recyclers with in-country processing capacity improves materially overnight. Scrap that currently leaves the U.S. for overseas processing would instead flow to domestic facilities.

The Commerce Department’s delegated authority under the 30 July determination is the mechanism through which critical minerals export curbs on black mass and rare earth magnet scrap could redirect material flows from overseas processors to domestic facilities like McBee.

The determination does not guarantee revenue or contracts for any individual company. What it establishes is the legal architecture under which domestic recyclers can become preferred suppliers for government procurement and benefit from restrictions on scrap exports. The August 2026 financing round closed shortly after the 30 July determination, and the sequencing suggests investors are explicitly underwriting both commercial contracts and emerging policy tailwinds.

What the McBee build-out signals for the rare earth recycling investment landscape

The specifics of Cyclic Materials’ build-out illustrate a broader structural logic that applies across the domestic critical minerals space. Five observations carry weight for investors evaluating this category:

• Hub-and-spoke financeability: Spoke facilities (MagCycle) deploy in smaller, faster-commissioning increments at lower individual capital expenditure. Hubs (REEPure) concentrate technical complexity and justify larger project finance structures once spokes are operational and feedstock volumes are observed. The Mesa, Arizona spoke represents the first U.S. deployment; McBee is the first integrated hub-and-spoke campus.
• Feedstock security as the gating factor: Processing capacity is bankable only when feedstock contracts are durable. The ERI partnership, formalised before the capital raise, demonstrates what de-risked supply-side structure looks like.
• Mining versus recycling lead times: New rare earth mines face decade-scale development windows and elevated permitting risk. Recycling works with domestically located, already-extracted material. Policy is now explicitly recognising this difference.
• Geographic co-location advantage: South Carolina’s proximity to EV manufacturing and advanced manufacturing clusters reduces transport friction and supports domestic content compliance. McBee’s MREO output is positioned as a practical input for nearby industrial customers across automotive, AI, semiconductors, robotics, defence, and medical equipment.
• Policy alignment under the Defense Production Act: The 30 July determination places end-of-life magnets on the same policy footing as traditional defence materials, creating a regulatory floor beneath the business model that did not exist six months ago.

Understanding this structural logic, phased capacity, feedstock contracts ahead of commissioning, hub-and-spoke modularity, and explicit policy alignment, provides a comparative lens for evaluating other domestic recycling and processing projects at earlier capital stages. Cyclic Materials’ $237 million equity base is the funded benchmark against which those comparisons now sit.

Recycling as infrastructure: where Cyclic Materials goes from the McBee groundbreaking

The next 18 months concentrate three converging forces that will determine whether the capital and policy commitments already made translate into a durable domestic supply position. Three concrete variables are worth tracking:

1. Mesa spoke commissioning confirmation: The Arizona facility’s Q3 2026 operational target is the immediate proof point. It provides the first evidence of the hub-and-spoke model performing at U.S. scale, ahead of the larger McBee build.
2. McBee groundbreaking and construction timeline: The Q4 2026 groundbreaking target and 2028 operations target are the milestones that convert the $82 million-plus campus investment from announcement to physical infrastructure.
3. Commerce Department regulatory action under the 30 July determination: The exogenous variable most likely to accelerate or complicate the competitive position of domestic recyclers in the near term. Investors should track its progress independently of individual company announcements.

Cyclic Materials was founded in 2021 in Kingston, Ontario. Five years later, it holds $237 million in equity funding, a presidential directive that formally recognises its feedstock category as a national defence resource, and a construction timeline that places domestic rare earth oxide production within a two-year window.

The question for investors and industry participants has shifted. It is no longer whether U.S. rare earth recycling is viable. It is whether the specific execution milestones over the next 18 months deliver on the policy and capital commitments already in place.

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with financial professionals before making investment decisions. Forward-looking statements regarding construction timelines, production targets, and regulatory developments are subject to change based on market conditions and various risk factors.