u/Relative-Reality7950

(Apologies for the AI slop)

I hadn't seen this discussed much, but Bloom's Korean automation supplier Koses may be giving us one of the best external breadcrumbs yet on how aggressively Bloom is preparing to scale manufacturing.

The order progression alone caught my attention:

• Late 2025: roughly $12M initial order
• April 2026: roughly $34M
• July 2026: $100M

So the latest order is roughly 8x the size of the first one.

But the much more interesting information came out of Korean reporting around those orders.

Koses says the latest equipment is destined for a 4 GW-scale mass-production line following an earlier pilot-line phase.

Separately, Koses says it has built the capability to manufacture automation equipment sufficient to support as much as 8 GW of production-capacity additions per year.

Important distinction: that does not mean Bloom currently has 8 GW of manufacturing capacity. It means one of Bloom's key manufacturing-equipment suppliers is preparing itself for a world in which its customer could be adding multiple gigawatts of capacity annually.

Then there's SK Securities, which follows Koses and models Bloom's manufacturing capacity at:

2027: 5 GW
2028: 8 GW
2029: 11 GW
2030: 15 GW

Those are analyst estimates, not Bloom guidance, so I wouldn't plug 15 GW into a Bloom valuation model as a committed outcome.

But as a window into what the supply chain may be preparing for? That's pretty interesting.

It also makes Bloom's older Fremont manufacturing video look different in hindsight.

Bloom's core cell-production process looks much more like electronics or solar manufacturing than conventional power-generation manufacturing: ceramic substrates move through automated screen printing, inspection, drying, high-temperature firing, robotic stack assembly and sintering.

At one point Bloom's manufacturing director describes the printing equipment as modular and says that if more capacity is needed, the tool can be split and another printhead inserted.

That's the key idea.

Bloom doesn't necessarily need to construct an entirely new factory every time it wants another chunk of capacity. It can add printheads, kilns, sintering capacity and automated assembly equipment, replicate lines, and eventually replicate facilities.

There are obviously still bottlenecks — ceramics, specialty materials, kilns, manufacturing yield, hotboxes, heat exchangers and the rest of the supply chain all matter.

But the manufacturing architecture itself looks unusually scalable.

Turbine makers scale by forging more complex machinery. Bloom scales by replicating manufacturing equipment.

And that's why the Koses disclosure matters to me.

This is increasingly not just Bloom management saying, “we can scale.”

We now have a third-party supplier receiving progressively larger purchase orders, talking about equipment for a 4 GW mass-production line, and preparing its own manufacturing infrastructure to support as much as 8 GW per year of equipment demand.

That's a much harder breadcrumb.

And if the AI power shortage really is becoming a time-to-power problem, Bloom's ability to manufacture not just power plants, but effectively manufacture more manufacturing capacity, could be a very important part of the advantage.

Sources: Koses Korean regulatory disclosures and press coverage, SK Securities' July 2026 Koses research, and Bloom's Fremont manufacturing tour.

Apologies in advance for the AI slop - needed some help expressing this:

Meteoric just released its Caldeira Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) on July 31, 2026. I think it is useful even if you do not own Meteoric, because it gives rare-earth investors a public pricing framework that has direct read-through to NioCorp.

The big lesson for me is this:

NioCorp’s Rare Earth Elements (REE) resources may not be side gravy. They may make or break the proposition.

For years, people have mostly framed NioCorp around niobium, scandium, and titanium. The Rare Earth Elements (REE) stream often gets treated as extra upside. Meteoric’s Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) suggests that may be the wrong way to think about it.

Meteoric showed two pricing cases.

Spot case: about $47/kg Total Rare Earth Oxides (TREO), with neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) around $129/kg.

Forecast case: about $86/kg Total Rare Earth Oxides (TREO), with neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) around $159/kg.

(NOTE: Meteoric’s Forecast case is not just a random management bull case: The DFS says the Spot case is based on Shanghai Metals Market (SMM) Free on Board (FOB) China oxide pricing, while the Forecast case uses the average of long-term forecasts from Argus Media and Adamas Intelligence. That matters because Argus and Adamas are specialist commodity / rare-earth market forecasters, not "trust me bro" guesses. The Forecast case still needs to be haircut like any forward commodity deck, but it is at least anchored to named third-party pricing work.)

That delta is the interesting part.

Neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) does not explain Meteoric’s forecast uplift. NdPr only rises about 23% between the Spot and Forecast cases, from roughly $129/kg to $159/kg.

But the full Total Rare Earth Oxides (TREO) basket rises about 83%, from roughly $47/kg to $86/kg.

So the real action has to be somewhere else.

That “somewhere else” is the heavy rare earths: dysprosium and terbium.

Current ex-China / Western scarcity pricing is messy and opaque, but the numbers I am tracking are roughly:

NdPr: about $144/kg

Dysprosium: about $1,000–1,450/kg

Terbium: about $4,500/kg

Those are not perfect screen prices. Rare earths do not trade like copper or gold. The market is thin, opaque, and heavily affected by China export controls. But they are useful as a scarcity-context reference.

Now compare that to the rough pricing bridge needed to support Meteoric’s higher forecast basket.

If you assume NdPr around $159/kg, hold the lower-value rare earths mostly static, and solve for the heavy rare earths needed to get to the $86/kg TREO forecast basket, you get something like:

Dysprosium: roughly $2,475/kg

Terbium: roughly $7,075/kg

That sounds crazy until you ask the real question:

What is qualified non-China dysprosium and terbium worth if there is none available?

A visible China price is not necessarily the same thing as available Western supply. If a buyer needs dysprosium or terbium to keep producing magnets, motors, defense systems, electric vehicles, wind turbines, drones, or guidance systems, then the clearing price can look ridiculous on a normal commodity screen.

Now the NioCorp read-through.

NioCorp has not yet published a full Rare Earth Elements (REE)-inclusive production model in its current economics (wen DFS???), so the following is illustrative math, not company guidance.

But using the run-rate output assumptions some investors have discussed:

NdPr: roughly 1,194 tonnes/year

Dysprosium: roughly 113 tonnes/year

Terbium: roughly 19 tonnes/year

At current ex-China / Western scarcity-context prices, the gross math looks like this:

1,194,000 kg NdPr x $144/kg = about $172M/year

113,000 kg dysprosium x $1,000–1,450/kg = about $113M–164M/year

19,000 kg terbium x $4,500/kg = about $86M/year

So even on today’s scarcity-context pricing, that is roughly $370M–421M/year of gross Rare Earth Elements (REE) value before haircuts.

At a Meteoric-style forecast-bridge deck, the math gets bigger:

1,194,000 kg NdPr x $159/kg = about $190M/year

113,000 kg dysprosium x $2,475/kg = about $280M/year

19,000 kg terbium x $7,075/kg = about $134M/year

Total: about $604M/year of gross Rare Earth Elements (REE) value before haircuts.

And yes, it absolutely needs to be haircut.

You cannot dismiss NioCorp’s rare-earth stream as “gravy” if the gross number could be hundreds of millions per year under serious heavy-rare-earth pricing.

If dysprosium and terbium are priced like ordinary China-linked oxides, NioCorp’s rare-earth stream is helpful upside.

If they are priced like scarce, qualified, non-China strategic materials, then NioCorp’s rare-earth stream may be central to whether the project is financeable at all.

Meteoric’s forecast case does not prove NioCorp’s economics. It does not prove NioCorp will capture those prices. And it does not replace the need for NioCorp to publish its own Rare Earth Elements (REE)-inclusive economics.

But it does show that a serious rare-earth developer can publicly support a forecast case where heavy rare earths carry major value.

For NioCorp, the key questions are:

Wen DFS?

What price deck will NioCorp use?

Will it disclose third-party pricing support?

Will it price NdPr, dysprosium, and terbium separately?

What recoveries will it assume?

What product form will it sell?

What separation / refining / offtake structure will it use?

Will offtake contracts recognize strategic non-China heavy-rare-earth value?

My takeaway:

Meteoric’s just-released Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) suggests that NioCorp’s Rare Earth Elements (REE) stream may be much more than a byproduct credit. It may be the difference between a difficult financing story and a strategically financeable project.

Not investment advice. Just a pricing framework I think rare-earth investors should be watching.