Battery diplomacy, made in Carolina

Forge Nano and Samsung SDI bet $400m on a North Carolina gigafactory, hoping scale will follow subsidy.

30 Jun 2026

A modest plot of land in Morrisville, North Carolina, will soon hold something rarer than its size suggests: an advanced battery plant built and owned, at least partly, on American soil. Forge Nano and Samsung SDI announced the venture on June 25th, aiming for output of three gigawatt-hours a year by 2028.

Money tells part of the story. Forge Nano will spend $300m-330m on the facility, with a $100m grant from the Department of Energy covering some of the difference. Samsung SDI, a South Korean firm with decades of manufacturing experience, supplies the operational know-how that a newer firm like Forge Nano lacks.

The structure is the clever bit. Rather than choosing between Samsung's conventional cells and Forge Nano's proprietary "Atomic Armor" coating technology, the plant will produce both. That hedges against shifts in battery chemistry while giving carmakers and grid-storage buyers more than one product to choose from under a single roof.

Paul Lichty, Forge Nano's chief executive, frames the deal as a first: "For the first time, a U.S. battery technology company will partner with a tier-1 battery manufacturer to produce their cells on American soil." The claim is plausible, if hard to verify, and points to a real gap. America's battery supply chains have leaned heavily on Asian manufacturing, leaving carmakers exposed to shipping delays and currency swings.

Subsidy explains much of the timing. The $100m federal grant followed a wave of similar awards meant to pull battery production stateside, a policy that predates the deal and will likely outlast it. Whether such grants produce lasting capacity, or merely shift where capacity briefly sits, remains the open question for industrial policy more broadly.

Three gigawatt-hours is not a large number against global production, which runs into the thousands. Still, Morrisville offers a template: pair foreign expertise with domestic capital and federal money, and modest plants can multiply faster than headlines suggest. Whether that holds depends less on this single plant than on whether subsidies persist once the political mood shifts.