USA Rare Earth merges with Inflection Point, debuts on NASDAQ

USA Rare Earth (USARE) went public on Friday, marking its debut on the Nasdaq under the ticker ‘USAR’ as chief executive Joshua Ballard and chairman Mike Blitzer rang the opening bell.

The company spent several years privately working to tap the Round Top are earth deposit in west Texas, with ambitious plans to create a domestic supply chain.

USARE controls the mining rights to Round Top, which it says contains 15 of the 17 rare earth elements, with a significant endowment of heavy rare earths dysprosium, terbium, gallium and beryllium. In 2021, USARE said it expects to produce nearly half of the critical minerals listed in the USGS revised list of raw materials deemed crucial for national security and the economy.

The IPO comes only a day after the company closed a deal with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: IPXX), with the aim to build one of the largest magnet facilities in North America.

The only active rare earths mine in the US is the Mountain Pass in California, owned by MP Materials, which produces separated and refined rare earths, including praseodymium-neodymium oxide, cerium and lanthanum.

In January, USARE produced a sample of dysprosium oxide with a purity of 99.1%, which is said marks a breakthrough in domestic rare earth production. In the same month, the company produced the first batch of sintered permanent rare earth magnets at its new plant under development in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

“The recent news on tariffs and rising global geopolitical tensions are a wake-up call for America – we must build a domestic rare earth mineral and magnet supply chain here at home to support a wide range of critical technologies, including our national defense,” CEO Joshua Ballard said in Thursday’s news release. “The closing of this transaction and our listing on Nasdaq is another key milestone in our evolution in building this supply chain.”

Ballard was appointed the company’s CEO in December 2024 after serving years as chief financial officer at Energy Recovery, a technology and ceramics manufacturing company.

“Magnets and ceramics, [are] close in terms of how they’re manufactured. So it’s a pretty easy leap for me on the magnet side,” Ballard told MINING.com in an interview.

“We’ve been working on the processing technology to unlock that deposit, especially the last three years quite intensely. We’ve made a lot of progress here, especially over the last 12 months in separating all of the elements,” Ballard said. “We’re using a mixture of more typical techniques. It’s heap crushed heap leach – we’re doing solvent extraction and precipitation on the front end to pull out the bulk minerals.

“Then we’re moving into our own continuous ion exchange technology that we’ve been developing in order to separate out the individual minerals from there.”

The next step, Ballard said, is to start scaling up lab work and move into the pre-feasibility stage.

“We still have work to do, but we’ve made a lot of progress on separating the minerals,” he said. “We’re moving pretty fast, going public. We’re really pushing to get the magnet facility up over the next year – it’s going to be close to 5,000 tons per year.”

Ballard pointed out that while reports of rare earths deposits in the Ukraine and Greenland make headlines, “if it’s even there, it’s decades away”, while the US is at a critical juncture.

“We’re sitting right here. We’re in America. We’ve got an incredible deposit. We just need to get it developed and get these minerals out of the ground so we can get the metals. This is a nearer-term milestone — 12 to 24 months at this stage.”

Market reaction to the IPO was overwhelmingly positive, with shares closing the day up 70% at $18.55 on the NASDAQ. The company has a $91.3 million market capitalization.