DOE Pumps $50M Into Coreshell and AM Batteries to Build a Graphite-Free Battery Supply Chain

Washington Bets on Silicon Over Graphite

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Coreshell Technologies a $50 million contract through its Manufacturing Deployment Office, with Massachusetts-based AM Batteries signed on as a subrecipient. The goal is straightforward: build the first American gigafactory churning out lithium-ion cells whose anodes use domestically sourced metallurgical silicon rather than graphite.

China controls more than 93 percent of global graphite supply, which makes the anode the most stubborn choke point in any battery supply chain trying to de-risk itself from overseas dependency. Coreshell wants to swap that graphite entirely for metallurgical silicon, a material already produced in the U.S. at scale. AM Batteries brings its Powder-to-Electrode dry-coating process to the cathode side, skipping the solvent-heavy wet slurry steps that dominate conventional battery plants.

What the Money Builds

The award, drawn from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is meant to fund manufacturing facilities with roughly 2 gigawatt-hours of electrode capacity and 1.5 gigawatt-hours of cell assembly capacity. Coreshell and AM Batteries say the project will create more than 100 domestic jobs, phased alongside construction and equipment ramp-up. The companies also claim the resulting cells will comply with the National Defense Authorization Act, making them the first scalable U.S. battery cells to cut Chinese minerals out of the equation.

That matters for both electric vehicles and defense applications. Military buyers have been vocal about wanting secure, onshore battery supply chains, and automakers need a path to EV batteries that does not hinge on a single country's graphite exports.

Why Additive Manufacturing Is in the Room

The partnership is a reminder that additive manufacturing is not just about printing parts. AM Batteries' dry-coating platform uses a powder deposition approach that shares DNA with additive process thinking: build functional material layers without the tooling, molds, or drying ovens that constrain traditional manufacturing. Coreshell, meanwhile, has already scaled its silicon-anode cells to a 60 Ah commercial format at a 4 MWh facility in San Leandro, California.

The award is not an overnight fix. Gigafactory construction takes years, and qualifying new anode chemistry for automotive programs is slow. But the funding does put real money behind a U.S. battery architecture that does not start with Chinese graphite. For an industry used to talking about supply chain resilience, this is one of the larger checks written to actually test it.