Winning the AI Race Part 3: Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, James Litinsky, Chase Lochmiller
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How did James Litinsky turn a failed hedge‑fund investment into the United States’ sole rare‑earth supplier?
Guys, this is one of the most amazing entrepreneurs that you're gonna meet, Jim Lutinsky, this founder and CEO of MP Materials.
Jim was a hedge fund guy running a pretty successful hedge fund. Uh and he ended up basically investing in something called Moly Corp, which went out of business. Yep. Yeah. And you did this incredible thing, which is you said, you know what, screw this. You essentially shuttered the fund, took over the company. And fast forward many years later, you are the uh largest and only, I think, supplier and refiner of rare earth materials and maker of magnets inside the United States.
We're a hundred percent of the American industry.
Hundred percent of the American industry. You just did two really incredible things actually in the last couple of weeks. One was you announced an enormous public private partnership with the DOD. Four hundred million dollars, et cetera. And then the second is you uh announced a really big deal with Apple.
Yes. Okay,
so yeah, take a should I take take a huge step back. Talk to us why rare earths matter. Tell us about the supply chain for AI, tell us why you're So
rare earth magnets are really the feedstock to physical AI. You know, robots, drones, everything we're talking about today, the biggest industry in the world to come. Essentially, electrified motion requires rare earth magnets. So you mentioned uh the predecessor went bankrupt. Um there there was a feeling when I when I took over this site with my co-founder, and this is this goes back to 2015. Um Where
where is the site?
This oh it's in Mountain Pass, California. So if you you'll be familiar, if you take a 45 minute drive from the Las Vegas Strip, uh just over the border in California uh is this site, you actually can see it from the road. Uh and it's actually the really the best rare earth ore body in the world. Um the thing about rare earths is that when you mine them, you also have to refine them, and it's really expensive and difficult to refine them. It's really a specialty chemical process. And so it's really a think of it as a multi-billion dollar refinery uh that you need to have just to separate them. And then once you separate them, you need to turn them into metal and then a magnet. And so there's a multiple layers of this stream to get this supply chain.
And of course, you could have all the rare earths in the world, but if you don't make the magnets, you're sending it to China. Or you could have all of the magnetic capability in the world, but if you don't have the rare earths, you're reliant on China. And so our vision from day one going back to we we originally bought these assets out of bankruptcy. Officially it was a two-year battle, took it out in 2017. And there was a perception that we just couldn't compete against China. And what we discovered actually is we could. It's a world-class site, but we had to we had to reorganize the process flow, and then we had to make investments to move downstream. So over the last eight years, we invested about a billion dollars.
Jamatha, as you know, we took the company public in 2020. We built out the refining capability, and then uh about four years ago, we announced we were gonna build a magnetics factory in Texas. We built that factory. We have GM as a foundational customer. We're now producing auto-grade magnets to GM spec and we'll be ramping up uh sales to GM at the end of this year in in magnets. And then Shamath, you referenced Uh it's been a busy few months for us. Um we announced a a pretty transformative public-private partnership with the Department of Defense. DOD is um there's really three pillars to this deal. Uh DOD is becoming our largest economic uh investor, um, as well as they're gonna provide uh a price floor for our commodities so that the Chinese sort of Chinese mercantilism, we can get into
That won't take the price of the commodity below the cost of production. And then as a result of the DOD investment, we're gonna accelerate the build-out of the magnetic supply chain. So we're expanding our facility in Texas for Apple.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
How did James Litinsky turn a failed hedge‑fund investment into the United States’ sole rare‑earth supplier?
0:00–13:56
2
Why are rare‑earth magnets the critical feedstock for the physical AI revolution?
13:56–27:22
3
What does the public‑private partnership between MP Materials, the Department of Defense and Apple entail?
27:22–43:34
4
How does Lisa Su explain AMD’s role in powering the AI race?
43:34–52:19
5
What challenges and opportunities does Crusoe face while building gigawatt‑scale AI factories?
52:19–1:00:46
6
How does Jensen Huang interpret Elon Musk’s tweet about 50 million H100 equivalents for the AI market?
1:00:46–1:03:54
7
What are the prospects and obstacles for on‑shoring semiconductor manufacturing in the United States?
1:03:54–1:04:37
Speakers
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