Permanent AlloyMagnets

Chinese permanent magnet material-related enterprises are facing opportunities: In 2025, it is reported that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has strictly controlled the export of rare earths, and it has been revealed that each unit of Tesla Optimus consumes 2.5 kilograms of neodymium-iron-boron. As the king of global light rare earths, Inner Mongolia Baotou Steel Rare-Earth Hi-Tech Co., Ltd. controls 90% of the resources of the Bayan Obo Mine and exclusively supplies rare earth raw materials for Tesla Optimus. Jiangxi Golden Energy Permanent Magnet Technology Co., Ltd. is the world's largest supplier of permanent magnets for humanoid robots. In 2024, it won a 2-billion-yuan order from NVIDIA's robot project. Ningbo YunSheng Co., Ltd. has entered the supply chain of Boston Dynamics and obtained an exclusive order for the motors of humanoid fingers.

The United States has developed a new magnetic alloy that can replace high-performance rare earth permanent magnets: In April 2015, Karl A. Gschneidner and other scientists from the Ames Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy developed a new magnetic alloy. This alloy is co-doped with neodymium, iron, boron, cerium, and cobalt, and can replace the high-performance permanent magnets in automobile engines and wind turbines. It does not use dysprosium, the rarest and most expensive rare earth element, and instead uses cerium, the most abundant rare earth element. Moreover, its intrinsic coercivity at high temperatures far exceeds that of magnets containing dysprosium, and the material cost is at least 20% to 40% lower than that of dysprosium-containing magnets.

The United Kingdom has made a breakthrough in the development of sustainable permanent magnets: The team led by scientists from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom has developed a hybrid thin film composed of a thin layer of cobalt and carbon molecules (fullerenes), which can increase the magnetic energy product of cobalt by five times at low temperatures. Although this effect has only been observed at low temperatures so far, the researchers hope that through the chemical manipulation of carbon molecules, the same effect can be achieved at room temperature in the future, which may replace rare earth permanent magnets and reduce environmental damage.