USA Rare Earth, Pasqal, Riven Systems Partner to Advance Rare Earth Processing

USA Rare Earth, Pasqal, and Riven Systems have formed a strategic partnership to advance next-generation technologies for critical mineral production, focusing on rare earths. The collaboration aims to develop more efficient separation techniques using quantum machine learning, which could significantly reduce the cost, energy consumption, and complexity of processing rare earth elements.

USA Rare Earth, based in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, is a leading company in the rare earth and critical minerals sector. Pasqal, a global leader in neutral-atom quantum computing, and Riven Systems, a specialist in AI for industrial chemistry, bring their respective expertise to the partnership. Together, they plan to explore technologies that could help secure a more competitive and sustainable Western rare earth supply chain.

The project will leverage Riven Systems' self-driving minerals separation laboratory and Pasqal's quantum computing power, combined with USA Rare Earth's extensive processing experience. Riven Systems will conduct thousands of automated experiments to generate training data for machine learning models. Pasqal's Neutral Atom Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) will then benchmark quantum machine learning models against classical computing-based models to optimize extractant selection.

Alex Moyes, Senior Vice President of Upstream at USA Rare Earth, emphasized the importance of this partnership. "The key challenge the rare earth industry outside Asia faces is to separate the Mixed Rare Earth Carbonate (MREC) produced in upstream operations into individual, separated oxides. The Chinese dominate this capability, especially for vital heavy rare earths such as dysprosium, terbium, and yttrium. Our goal is to accelerate the path to efficient, competitive, and sustainable solutions by changing how the rare earth industry discovers the chemistry it runs on, replacing years of trial-and-error."

The partnership will focus on USA Rare Earth's feedstocks, including the Round Top mine in Sierra Blanca, Texas, as well as third-party mixed rare earth carbonates and recycled cuttings from the magnet manufacturing process. By targeting these key feedstocks, the experimental work can potentially impact all aspects of USA Rare Earth's materials processing work.

Pasqal's CEO, Wasiq Bokhari, highlighted the strategic importance of the collaboration. "Rare earth materials are essential, and improving how they are processed has implications far beyond a single industry. By combining Pasqal's quantum computing capabilities with USA Rare Earth's materials expertise and Riven's advanced automation platform, we have an opportunity to accelerate innovation while demonstrating how French and American companies can work together to strengthen critical supply chains."

Riven Systems' Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Dr. Orion Archer Cohen, expressed optimism about the potential of the project. "AI and autonomous labs are the next frontier in critical mineral processing. We applaud USA Rare Earth's proactive adoption of these technologies, which forge a path to significant improvements over legacy chemistry. This is exactly how the West can leverage its lead in advanced compute technologies to reindustrialize faster."

The initial machine learning project is expected to create opportunities for a deeper, extended collaboration. Over time, the companies envision a first-of-a-kind, end-to-end extractant discovery process. A quantum machine learning model will identify high-potential extractants, which will be tested in Riven's self-driving lab and validated in USA Rare Earth's R&D facility in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, before being integrated into USA Rare Earth's flowsheets.

This strategic partnership marks a significant step in the development of advanced technologies for rare earth processing, aiming to enhance the efficiency, sustainability, and competitiveness of the Western rare earth supply chain.