Well. the last official news on that is that they were...

Well. the last official news on that is that they were negotiating with Shin Etsu for a binding agreement.
Of course, in that case ShinEtsu would keep the 4 big magnet REEs for itself.

What IC might be alluding to is that one of the strategic partners - lets say Siemens - is saying "wait a minute, if we finance your plant we don't just want the hafnium, niobium etc but also the magnet REEs. That could be solved either
- by a three way agreement whereby Siemens will buy magnets produced by ShinEtsu (most likely imO).
- Or they (Siemens) would have to help us get access to another toll treatment plant (in France?) or
- Siemens could finance a new REE separation plant. Q: with whose technology? Alk once said it would take them 24 months to develop a REE separation plant on their own - that's been a while ago and the current plan already proposes Alk separating out Y, La and Ce (which is the easier part). There are a lot of cheap minors with separation tech out there that Siemens could easily buy out of pocket change if that's where they want to go ....

Interesting stuff. Tracy really should have dug deeper here ...