The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a combined $50 million to Coreshell Technologies and AM Batteries to build out domestic, additive manufacturing-based production lines for lithium-ion battery anodes — a bet that roll-to-roll dry-coating and silicon-replacement chemistry can do for battery cells what the last decade of AM did for prototyping and tooling. The award, funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, was announced August 27, 2026, and is part of a much larger DOE push to pull the battery supply chain out of China's orbit.

Both companies build electrodes, not printers, but the manufacturing logic is familiar to anyone who has followed industrial AM: replace a slow, wet, chemically messy legacy process with a cleaner, layer-additive one, and the economics and the supply chain change at the same time.

Two Companies, One Bottleneck

The bottleneck both startups are attacking is the anode — specifically, the graphite that anchors nearly every lithium-ion battery on the market today, and the wet-slurry coating process used to apply electrode material to current collectors. China currently supplies more than 90% of the world's graphite, and the companies describe the wet-slurry coating process itself as more costly and more environmentally destructive than the dry-coating alternative AM Batteries is bringing to the project.

Coreshell Technologies, based in the Bay Area, replaces graphite outright with metallurgical silicon (MGS) anodes — a chemistry that, per the companies, sidesteps the specialty processing that has concentrated global graphite refining in China.

AM Batteries, a Massachusetts startup founded in 2020 and backed by TDK Ventures, Anzu Partners, and Toyota Ventures, attacks the coating step itself. Its proprietary roll-to-roll (R2R) additive manufacturing process uses powder deposition for dry-coating; on this project, the companies say AM Batteries — the subrecipient on the DOE award, with Coreshell as prime recipient — is applying that dry-coating process to the battery cathodes, alongside Coreshell's silicon anode chemistry, in place of the wet-slurry step. Dry coating is additive in the same sense a powder-bed printer is additive: material goes down where it's needed, roll to roll, without the solvent-based wet-slurry step used in conventional electrode coating.

Together, according to the companies, the combination is significant enough to make a specific claim: this is, they say, the first scalable process in the United States that can completely eliminate Chinese minerals from the battery supply chain. That's a strong statement, and it's the companies' own characterization rather than an independent DOE finding — but it's the thesis the award is built around.

What the Money Buys

The DOE funding is aimed at concrete production capacity, not just R&D. The stated targets are 2 GWh of electrode manufacturing capacity and 1.5 GWh of cell assembly capacity, with more than 100 jobs projected across the two companies as that capacity comes online. Those numbers put this squarely in the "build the line" phase rather than the lab-scale demonstration phase — the DOE is funding factories, not just proof-of-concept hardware.

There's also a defense and procurement angle: Coreshell and AM Batteries say their process is built to comply with National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) sourcing rules. NDAA-compliant sourcing rules typically exist to steer federal and defense buyers away from battery materials with certain foreign-entity-of-concern content, so a domestic, NDAA-compliant anode and cell supply would plausibly be relevant to defense primes and federal buyers — though the source material doesn't name specific customers. For manufacturers building anything that eventually needs a NDAA-compliant battery, whether that's a drone, a robot, or backup power for a piece of industrial equipment, domestic anode capacity at gigawatt-hour scale is a supply option that largely does not exist today.

The Bigger Round It Sits Inside

The $50 million Coreshell/AM Batteries award is one piece of a much larger initiative. On August 20, 2026, the DOE announced $500 million across seven selected projects under the third round of its Battery Materials Processing and Battery Manufacturing and Recycling grant program. Energy Secretary Chris Wright framed the round bluntly: "For too long, America has depended on foreign actors for critical materials essential to modern life that underpin our economy, energy security, and national security." Assistant Secretary Audrey Robertson added that "DOE is taking decisive action to secure the critical supply chains necessary to power our nation." The Coreshell/AM Batteries award is the piece of that seven-project, $500 million round with the most direct relevance to advanced manufacturing: it's explicitly a bet on additive, roll-to-roll processing as the mechanism for re-shoring a piece of the battery supply chain, rather than simply subsidizing a conventional graphite/wet-slurry gigafactory on U.S. soil.

What It Means for Makers

Nothing here changes what's on the shelf at your local filament supplier this week. Coreshell and AM Batteries are building anode and cell manufacturing capacity, not selling batteries or cells directly to consumers or hobbyists, and 2 GWh of electrode capacity is a fraction of what a single large EV gigafactory produces annually. There's no announced timeline in the source material for when cells built on this process reach any commercial channel, hobbyist or otherwise.

The relevance for the maker and small-manufacturer world is upstream and structural rather than immediate. If dry-coating and silicon-anode processes scale as intended, the manufacturing techniques involved — roll-to-roll powder deposition being conceptually close to other additive processes readers of this site already track — demonstrate that "additive manufacturing" as a category is expanding well past plastics and metal into materials science far removed from a desktop printer. It's also a data point on where U.S. industrial policy is pushing capital: toward domestic, non-Chinese-mineral battery supply chains, with defense-adjacent NDAA compliance as an explicit design goal of the companies involved. Anyone building products that eventually need batteries — robotics, drones, off-grid power, tool packs — for defense or federal customers should note that a domestic, NDAA-compliant anode supply chain is now actively being funded into existence, even if it doesn't yet exist at commercial scale.

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