Monday 5 October 2026 535 stories on file Full archive
Daily Edition
newscms

Volume III Edition Daily

Samsung SDI Starts US LFP Cell Production in October: Why the Non-Chinese Prismatic Line Matters More Than the 30 GWh Number

For most of the last three years, the story of battery cells made in the United States has been a story of automotive ambition. Gigafactories announced at political rallies, billions in incentives, and production lines…

Battery Tech 2,704 words 13 min read By news.jualin.id

Samsung SDI Starts US LFP Cell Production in October: Why the Non-Chinese Prismatic Line Matters More Than the 30 GWh Number — Battery Tech No Image Battery Tech
Lead image · Filed 5 October 2026, 00:48

Samsung SDI Starts US LFP Cell Production in October: Why the Non-Chinese Prismatic Line Matters More Than the 30 GWh Number

Introduction

For most of the last three years, the story of battery cells made in the United States has been a story of automotive ambition. Gigafactories announced at political rallies, billions in incentives, and production lines built to put high-energy-density nickel-manganese-cobalt packs into electric cars. Then consumer EV tax credits expired in September 2025, demand stalled, and a large part of that industrial base had to find a different customer.

The answer, increasingly, has been the grid. And the chemistry that won that redirection is not the one that gets the headlines. Lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, is the duller cousin of the exotic solid-state and lithium-metal cells that dominate battery journalism: no cobalt, no nickel, lower energy density, and a flat, unglamorous chemistry that trades acceleration for endurance. It is also, as of this autumn, the chemistry that Korean and American manufacturers are actually mass-producing at scale inside the United States.

On October 2026, Samsung SDI begins production of prismatic LFP cells at its StarPlus Energy plant in Kokomo, Indiana, a joint venture with Stellantis, with customer deliveries of its LFP-based containerised system, the Samsung Battery Box 2.0, expected before the end of the year. On its own, that is a routine quarterly milestone: the company disclosed the October date in its second-quarter results, described the line as being in mass-production quality validation, and reiterated a 30 GWh annual capacity target for US battery energy storage cells by the end of 2026.

The more consequential detail sits in a single adjective. Samsung SDI says it is the only non-Chinese manufacturer of prismatic LFP cells. In a market where roughly two-thirds of global battery cell manufacturing capacity is Chinese, and where United States tax rules now actively disqualify projects that buy too much Chinese-supplied equipment, that sentence does more work than the gigawatt-hour figure. The line is not just capacity. It is eligibility.

The plant, the joint venture, and the pivot

The Kokomo site has an inauspicious corporate history. StarPlus Energy was formed as a Samsung SDI and Stellantis joint venture, announced in July 2023 with more than $3 billion of planned investment and a target of 36 GWh of annual capacity for North American electric vehicles. It was a textbook version of the strategy that defined the 2021 to 2024 battery investment boom: an automaker securing cells, a cell maker securing a customer, and both of them relying on a US consumer market that was expected to grow without interruption.

It did not. United States EV purchase incentives ended in September 2025, and the automaker found itself holding a battery plant sized for a market that stopped arriving. That is not a hypothetical: it is the pattern that has run through the North American battery sector, and it is why Samsung SDI's move reads less like an expansion than a retooling.

In November 2025 the company said it would repurpose US lines to produce cells for stationary storage, targeting 30 GWh of annual battery energy storage cell capacity in the country by end-2026. By September's RE+ trade show it had introduced the two containerised systems that those cells would fill: the Samsung Battery Box 1.7, a 6.14 MWh unit using nickel cobalt aluminium oxide cells, and the Samsung Battery Box 2.0, a 20-foot container using LFP cells. The NCA line began producing in Indiana in late 2025 through StarPlus Energy; the LFP line follows in October.

The pivot extends beyond Kokomo. On August 11, 2026, Samsung SDI announced it had signed a new development agreement with General Motors to co-develop a next-generation prismatic cell for future EV applications — and, in the same release, that it was buying GM's 49.99 percent stake in the SynergyCells joint venture at New Carlisle, Indiana. The stated reason was market change: slower-than-expected EV growth. The effect was that Samsung SDI acquired its first wholly owned battery plant in North America, a 680-acre campus that GM had developed to roughly $300 million before construction paused. The company said the plant would start life producing cells for energy storage systems, with the GM-developed prismatic cells a possible later addition.

That is the pattern in a single month: an automotive joint venture unwound, a wholly owned plant redirected to the grid, and a development agreement signed with one automaker while the other automaker's assets were absorbed. It is what a battery industry adjusting to the fact that the vehicle market and the power market are now two different businesses with two different demand curves has begun to look like.

Why LFP, and why the prismatic format specifically

The choice of chemistry is not a cost-cutting compromise, which is the most common misreading of LFP. A grid battery sits on a concrete pad in a steel container. Nobody is trying to minimise its mass. What matters is how many thousands of charge-discharge cycles it survives over a fifteen to twenty year asset life, how it behaves under sustained thermal stress, and what it costs per kilowatt-hour of installed capacity. LFP wins on all three counts. It sustains roughly 3,000 to 5,000 full cycles where an NMC cell delivers something closer to 500 to 1,500. It does not carry the same thermal runaway risk under identical abuse. And it costs materially less per kilowatt-hour for stationary installations, because the cathode contains iron and phosphorus instead of cobalt and nickel.

What LFP gives up is energy density, and for a stationary installation that is a rounding error. The trade-off that keeps NMC in cars is irrelevant in a container.

The prismatic format is a separate decision and a more interesting one. Prismatic cells are flat, rectangular, and built in large formats; pouch and cylindrical cells are the alternatives. Grid integrators have standardised their racks, their container layouts, and their thermal designs around whatever cell geometry arrives first at scale. Samsung SDI's position — the only non-Chinese prismatic LFP manufacturer with a US production base — is therefore not merely a scale claim. It is a claim about interchangeability: its cells can be a drop-in option for integrators whose tooling and container designs were built around the dominant Chinese prismatic supply.

That is a commercially real advantage in a market where system integrators are, one procurement rule at a time, being pushed away from that dominant supply.

The tax rule that makes it matter

The reason this particular line matters more than a 30 GWh headline is a piece of United States tax legislation that most consumers will never hear about and every battery developer cannot ignore.

Under the Foreign Entity of Concern rules carried into current law by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, storage projects must clear a compliance threshold to qualify for the investment tax credit. Compliance is measured by the Material Assistance Cost Ratio — the share of project equipment cost not sourced from Prohibited Foreign Entities — and the thresholds rise every year. For storage, the requirement starts at 55 percent in 2026, climbs to 60 percent in 2027, 65 percent in 2028, 70 percent in 2029, and 75 percent from 2030 onward. Storage faces higher thresholds than solar and wind, precisely because its equipment is more concentrated in restricted-entity manufacturing.

The threshold that decides most projects is a single line item. Battery cells are 52 percent of total equipment cost under the IRS safe-harbour tables. That is more than half the equation. Under the Carina Energy breakdown of the safe harbours, if a developer buys cells from a Prohibited Foreign Entity and sources everything else — inverters, printed circuit boards, thermal management, battery management systems, enclosures, packaging — from compliant suppliers, the non-restricted ratio lands around 48 percent. That fails a 55 percent requirement. In practice, a grid-scale storage project beginning construction in 2026 has no realistic path to the investment tax credit with restricted cells. Cell sourcing is not one procurement decision among many; it is the decision that determines whether the project is financeable at all.

The compliance burden is also not a one-off. If a developer claims the credit and then makes payments within ten years under a contract giving a Specified Foreign Entity operational control over the project, the full credit must be repaid. Compliance is a decade-long obligation, not a checkbox, which is precisely why it does not get solved by a well-meaning substitution order in the procurement phase.

Samsung SDI's answer has been to build the supply chain rather than just the cell. The company says it has secured LFP cathode material in advance through partnerships with Korean and United States suppliers, and has localised other key components to establish a non-restricted supply chain — which it identifies as the key priority, because cathode material is a significant share of product cost. It is also developing sodium-ion cells for data centre and large-scale storage applications, without committing to a commercialisation timeline.

That work is now visible in the numbers. Second-quarter 2026 revenue was KRW 3.77 trillion, up 18.5 percent year on year, with operating profit of KRW 203.8 billion — the company's first profitable quarter since the third quarter of 2024. Battery division revenue rose 18.8 percent to KRW 3.52 trillion. Net profit jumped 740.5 percent quarter on quarter to KRW 471.6 billion. Samsung SDI attributed the return to high-power products for uninterruptible power supply systems, battery backup units, power tools, European EV sales, and demand from AI data centres and utility-scale storage, alongside a better product mix, higher advanced manufacturing production credits, and favourable tariff effects.

The company also signed long-term supply agreements with US battery storage customers during the quarter, which are thought to include a roughly KRW 1.5 trillion (US$1 billion) agreement announced in March covering both LFP and NCA cells from the Indiana plant. Order intake, per executive vice president Yonghui Cho, is strong enough to cover a substantial portion of planned capacity through 2029, with demand expected to exceed production capacity from 2028 onward. The company says it is reviewing options for additional capacity.

This is where the angle deserves a little scepticism. A company that expects demand to exceed capacity from 2028 while publicly reviewing whether to add any is describing an intention, not a plant. And the October date has moved before: mass production for LFP was previously framed as beginning in the third quarter of 2026, which has now become the fourth quarter. Dates disclosed in earnings calls slip. The verifiable milestone is narrower and more useful — customer deliveries of the Samsung Battery Box 2.0 before the end of 2026 — and that is the one worth watching.

The broader scramble for compliant cells

Samsung SDI's October start is one move in a sector-wide scramble, and the competitive frame explains both the opportunity and the fragility.

LG Energy Solution is further ahead on the same strategy. It began LFP cell production in the United States by converting nickel manganese cobalt lines at its Holland, Michigan plant, and in August 2026 opened a new facility in Lansing, Michigan — a $2 billion investment on 226 acres, projected to exceed 35 GWh of annual capacity, employing roughly 1,700 people at full scale. The Lansing cells feed LG Energy Solution Vertech's turnkey enclosures, with Detroit utility DTE Energy among the initial customers. The company targets more than 50 GWh of North American LFP capacity by end-2026, and expects 80 percent of its global energy storage manufacturing capacity to sit in North America by the same date.

SK On is pursuing a comparable conversion. And the automakers are not standing still either: the shift has drawn new entrants, including Ford and General Motors, into supplying storage cells directly.

What the LG comparison also reveals is how much of this is still a bet on a demand curve that does not have a track record. LG Energy Solution's own North America president was blunt about solid-state cells at the company's newly opened Lansing plant in a recent media roundtable: the problem with solid-state is large-scale production, and if you are making very large form factors, most companies are struggling. He expects specialised applications — consumer devices, drones, performance vehicles — to reach volume production well before electric vehicles, and argued that incremental gains in conventional lithium-ion packs will keep driving real-world EV range. The same company is simultaneously building 35 GWh of LFP capacity for the grid. That is not a contradiction; it is an accurate description of where the money is actually going while the more glamorous chemistry is still a laboratory problem.

Samsung SDI is making the same bet with a different balance sheet, and has been funding it from an unusual source. On August 21, 2026 it announced it would sell 13.09 million shares of its affiliate Samsung Display back to the display maker at KRW 340,000 per share — roughly KRW 4.45 trillion, about US$3.2 billion — scheduled to close on August 27. Samsung SDI framed the purpose as securing investment capital for future growth engines, and will retain a 10.22 percent stake. Unlocking a decades-old passive cross-holding for cash, rather than issuing equity or adding debt, is what gives the company room to build capacity against an order book it says is full through 2029.

Conclusion

The framing of 2026 battery news as a solid-state countdown misses the more immediate story. Solid-state cells remain genuinely promising and genuinely unmanufactured at automotive scale, and the caution coming out of Michigan this autumn was well earned. The real industrial movement in battery manufacturing this year is quieter and further along: the redirection of enormous automotive cell capacity toward stationary storage, and the construction of a compliant, non-Chinese prismatic LFP supply chain in the United States.

Samsung SDI's October production start at Kokomo is the visible part of that. Its significance is not the 30 GWh figure, which is a target, nor the October date, which has already slipped once. It is that a company which describes itself as the only non-Chinese prismatic LFP producer with a US footprint is now shipping cells against a procurement rule that requires one. For a sector where the cell line item alone is 52 percent of equipment cost and decides whether a project keeps its tax credit, that is not a manufacturing milestone. It is eligibility made physical.

For the wider battery technology market, the lesson is that the bottleneck in the energy storage buildout is no longer demand, capacity, or chemistry. It is paperwork attached to where a cell was made — a constraint that a competitor cannot engineer around, and that a supplier which has already spent a year building a compliant supply chain can monetise immediately.

Images

Illustrative: a containerised battery energy storage cabinet of the type being produced for the US grid market. The enclosure shown is not Samsung SDI equipment.

A containerised battery energy storage cabinet standing outdoors in front of an industrial building, with hazard-marked service doors and roof-mounted cooling units

Illustrative: a vendor rendering of a containerised battery energy storage product. The unit pictured carries a third-party brand and is not Samsung SDI equipment.

A 3D product rendering of a white containerised battery energy storage unit with blue and green striping against a grey studio background

Illustrative: an installed containerised energy storage site in Washington state. This is a vanadium flow battery system, not a lithium iron phosphate installation.

A row of white shipping-container energy storage units installed on a gravel pad beside a paved access road, with trees and grass around

Illustrative: the internal structure of a prismatic lithium-ion cell, the flat rectangular format used in grid storage containers.

A labelled technical diagram showing the internal structure of a prismatic lithium-ion cell with component names and functions written alongside

References