This week, Volta released its 769-slide report on the state of the battery industry. Included in the report was the fact that in 2025, 86% of all lithium-ion battery cells produced globally were produced in China. This near-monopoly on battery production will become an increasing supply chain liability for the US as renewable energy sources like solar become a bigger and bigger part of the energy mix, making the US economy even more reliant on imported Chinese batteries than it already is.
Taking into account how energy-hungry data centers are, with a projected 40% gap between the available power for US data centers and the projected demand as soon as this year, our reliance on Chinese batteries becomes a concerning source of vulnerability in the AI race. In this respect, Chinese batteries are to the US what Nvidia GPUs are to China. As we wrote late last year in our deep dive on chip export controls, “China could exploit its manufacturing and energy production capabilities to win the AGI race by scaling compute infrastructure much faster than the US.” For this reason, Volta predicts that securing the battery supply chain will soon become a key national security priority.
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