When Interior Secretary Doug Burgum toured LG’s manufacturing facility in Lansing, Michigan, last month, he wasn’t just checking in on an auto parts plant. He was carefully watching a plant originally built to make only electric vehicle batteries expand into battery production that can store power for the electric grid, a shift that could help America power the AI boom and compete with China.
Good. For years, Washington treated the electric grid like something that would simply keep working no matter how much we demanded of it. That era is over. Between the AI boom, a manufacturing renaissance, and a Pentagon that needs more power at more bases, the United States is in a race for electrons — one that China is hoping we lose.
AI data centers require enormous amounts of reliable, around-the-clock electricity. Batteries can help bring that power online faster by relieving pressure on an already strained grid and getting more capacity out of the power plants and transmission infrastructure we already have.
The problem is that China currently controls roughly 80 percent of global battery cell manufacturing capacity and an even tighter grip on the materials batteries are made from. The CCP boasts nearly 70 percent of global critical mineral processing capacity overall, including the overwhelming majority of the world’s battery-grade graphite.
Beijing has already shown it’s willing to use that leverage. In 2023, China imposed export licensing controls on key battery-grade graphite, citing “national security,” and graphite exports to the rest of the world collapsed by more than 90 percent in the following month. A domestic battery industry — cells, minerals, and storage systems alike — is the only real insurance against a supply chain that a strategic competitor can turn off at will, and the Trump administration knows it.
That’s why the U.S. made a point to install a record 18.9 gigawatts of battery storage in 2025, 52 percent more than the year before, and followed it with another record-breaking start to 2026, installing 3.3 GW in the first quarter alone — 54 percent above the previous Q1 record.
