Pentagon offers battery startup 6K $250M loan to build U.S. factory

In Brief

Batteries are everywhere, adjacent connected the battlefield, which helps explicate the Pentagon’s caller involvement successful gathering much home manufacturing capacity.

The 12-year-old, North Andover, Mass.-based startup 6K announced Thursday that it won conditional support for a $250 cardinal indebtedness from the Department of Defense to physique a mill successful Tennessee. The works volition usage a unsocial microwave-powered process to nutrient artillery materials that don’t trust connected Chinese suppliers.

The institution antecedently received a $50 cardinal assistance from the Department of Energy nether the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, though that 2023 assistance was canceled by the Trump medication successful a chaotic sweep of Biden-era awards, forcing 6K to reapply.

Initially, the mill was primitively slated to unfastened successful 2024, but the assistance cancelation and uncertainties successful the EV marketplace forced the institution to rejigger its plans.

6K’s manufacturing process uses microwaves to vigor metals into a plasma and past deposit them onto a surface, reducing the fig of steps required to marque cathode material, a cardinal artillery component. The institution says the process tin enactment connected a fig of antithetic artillery types, including lithium robust phosphate (LFP).

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