Jiang-Ping Wang's Iron Nitride Magnet May End China's Dominance in Key Tech Component
By Tom Kagy | 22 Apr, 2025

A powerful magnet invented by a University of Minnesota professor will free US industry from reliance on rare-earth magnets imported from China.

One of the first victims of Trump's tariff war with China is the 7,000 tons of powerful rare-earth magnets imported each year from China.  These magnets are used in high-end EV motors, wind turbines, computer disk drives, weapons systems, speakers, headphones and any automation that requires small powerful electric motors. 

Industrial-strength permanent magnets that can lift thousands of times their own weight were invented in 1984 independently by General Motors and Sumitomo Special Metals.  The lanthanide metal neodymium was found to have unmatched magnetic power but an extremely low Curie temperature, losing its attractive properties at room temperature.  When alloyed with iron and boron its magnetic properties are retained at the higher temperatures at which magnets are typically used.

The drawback of such so-called NIB (neodymium-iron-boron) magnets is that while neodymium is relatively common and abundant across the earth's surface, it exists only in extremely low concentrations.  Extracting sufficient quantities is labor-intensive and environmentally degrading.  As a result the production of neodymium magnets was left to China, allowing it to produce 90% of the world's neodymium magnets.

This reliance on Chinese exports for a critical component of technology and weapons systems was perceived a potential vulnerability by the US Energy Department.  It encouraged domestic research into alternative types of permanent magnets.  By 2014 Professor Jiang-Ping Wang at the University of Minnesota used nanomaterial engineering techniques to enrich iron with nitrogen atoms to produce powerful magnets without rare-earth elements or environmental impact.

The technique to produce iron nitride magnets developed in Wang's lab was spun off by the University into a startup called Niron Magnetics.  A $17.5 million grant from the Department of Energy as part of its ARPA-E push to seed critical advances for leading energy technologies helped Niron build a 70,000-square-foot pilot manufacturing facility in Minneapolis.  The facility opened in October of 2024 and has the capacity to produce 5 tons of iron nitride magnets under the brand name Clean Earth Magnets.

Plans have now been made to build a full-scale facility in Sartell, Minnesota to produce 1,500 tons of Clean Earth Magnets per year.  The facility is scheduled to open in 2026 to begin addressing the exploding demand for powerful permanent from the clean energy sector, especially if the current tariff war continues.

Professor Jiang-Ping Wang remains focused on research in nanomaterial engineering related to computing applications for spintronics.  Just as magnets rely on an optimal alignment of non-paired electrons in the outermost orbits of atoms, spintronics relies on manipulating the up or down spins of electrons to store and process data instead of relying on the more energy-wasting on-off switching of electrical current flow.  

Spintronics devices replace the capacitors of conventional computer chips with tunneling magnetoresistant structures (TMR) in which an insulating layer is sandwiched between a magnetic layer with electrons with a fixed spin and a magnetic layer with electrons with switchable spin. 

When the switchable layer spin is made to align with the the spin of the fixed layer, electrons are able to tunnel through the insulating layer — a phenomenon only achievable at the quantum level.   Spintronics uses this quantum tunneling effect for ultra-efficient computing that requires a fraction of the energy of conventional electronic processors.  The same quantum effect can also be used as the basis for a key component of quantum computing, a development that has captured the attention of spintronic researchers like Wang.