Neo Performance Materials said the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency has invited it to prepare a grant agreement for up to 126 million euros, about 141 million dollars, under the EU Innovation Fund for Project GAUSS in Estonia. The project, worth about 400 million euros in total, would expand an integrated rare earth value chain spanning separation, metallisation and magnet manufacturing, adding up to 3,000 tonnes a year of permanent magnets, with one third of that capacity allocated to offshore wind farms in the European Union.
The scope has three parts. Silmet 2.0 would triple total separation capacity for light and heavy rare earths, and was designated a Strategic Project under the EU Critical Raw Materials Act earlier this month. A metallisation step would convert separated oxides into metals. The Phase 1B magnet expansion would lift nameplate capacity from 2,000 tonnes to about 5,000 tonnes a year. Neo began commercial production at the Estonian magnet plant in September, shipping sintered magnets to a tier one electric vehicle motor customer.
The money is not yet secured. The maximum grant would cover about 31.5 percent of project costs, leaving roughly 274 million euros to fund elsewhere, and the process still requires legal entity validation, a financial capacity assessment and ethics and security reviews, with signing targeted by March 23, 2027 and a build of two to three years.
GAUSS is one of 77 projects sharing 3.4 billion euros in this Innovation Fund round. Its significance is structural: Europe’s rare earth problem is not ore, it is the separation, metal and magnet steps dominated by China, and Estonia is where the EU is concentrating its attempt to build those steps at scale.