Europe’s largest rare-earth magnet factory has opened in Narva, Estonia.
The EU funded factory will produce rare-earth permanent magnets to be used in key economic sectors, for example in electric vehicles, wind turbines and microelectronics.
As more than 90% of magnets currently imported in the EU come from China, the new factory will, it is said, greatly increase Europe’s strategic autonomy and competitiveness which are crucial for the clean and industrial transition.
Comment at the opening on Friday, 19 September, came from Executive Vice-President for Cohesion and Reforms Raffaele Fitto.
The official said: “The inauguration of the magnet factory is a perfect example of how Cohesion Policy can make a real difference for a region and its citizens by creating new jobs and boosting the economy. But not only that: this EU funded project will also contribute to increasing the competitiveness of the whole EU. It shows once again how Cohesion policy is a win-win policy for all Europeans”.
The factory was built thanks to a support of €14.5 million from the Just Transition Fund. It will have a significant positive impact on the economy in Narva and the wider Ida-Viru County by creating up to 1,000 jobs and attracting talent from around the world.
It will also greatly enhance Europe’s industrial capacity and strategic autonomy in rare-earth magnets.
The factory will increase the resilience of this region and help its transition away from the extraction of oil shale, a fossil fuel-based economic activity on which the region has relied on in the past.
Meanwhile, the new JUPITER supercomputer inaugurated by the EU and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, has officially become the first European system to achieve the exascale threshold, that is, performing more than one quintillion (10¹⁸) operations per second, a computing power level comparable to aggregating the computing capabilities of one million modern smartphones.
A Commission spokesman said, “With this milestone, Europe enters the global league of high‑performance computing.”
Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkkunen, said: ”This is a historic milestone.”
“With JUPITER, Europe becomes the home of the most powerful computer in Europe, and the fourth most powerful in the world.”
“Just as the planet Jupiter has a gravitational pull that shapes our solar system, the JUPITER supercomputer will pull Europe’s research community, its start-ups, its industry, and its talent together. It will attract investment, stimulate breakthrough, pushing Europe forward.”
