GM and Samsung SDI to invest $3 billion in U.S. battery plant

General Motors and Samsung SDI said they will invest over $3 billion to build a joint-venture electric vehicle battery plant in the United States.

Targeted to start in 2026, the plant is expected to have an annual production capacity of 30 gigawatt hours, Samsung SDI said in a regulatory filing.

The company said the location of the planned JV plant is not yet decided.

GM, like other automakers, is looking to diversify its battery supply chain and secure capacity of components to support its electrification goals as it attempts to catch up with Tesla.

The GM-Samsung SDI cells will be prismatic and cylindrical cell-to-pack style cells. That means the cells can go directly into the battery pack, rather than into a module within the pack. Cells by Ultium Cells LLC, a joint venture between GM and LG Energy Solution, are pouches that are loaded into modules in the battery pack.

The Samsung SDI partnership shows GM’s drive to expand its battery supply base and its EV architecture “where they feel prismatic and cell to pack is a better configuration than what they can achieve with a pouch,” Prabhakar Patil, battery expert and former LG Chem Power executive, told Automotive News.

The GM-Samsung SDI cell chemistry will be nickel-cobalt-manganese, the same chemistry as Ultium Cells, Mike Anderson, GM vice president of global electrification and battery systems, told reporters Tuesday. GM must offer various cell form factors and chemistries to address a broad market, Anderson said.

“That journey requires more than scaling…. just one element the same way all on our own or even with one partner,” he said. “Ultimate flexibility in our strategic partnerships with both LGES and now Samsung SDI not only enables us to apply the right technologies in the right places, but also to optimally scale faster than we think we could really any other way.”

GM said last year it expects to build 400,000 EVs in North America from 2022 through mid-2024 and increase capacity to 1 million units annually in North America in 2025.

Sources say GM is considering if it will eventually need at least two additional EV plants to meet future EV demand.

A person at Samsung SDI said the South Korean company "would likely have more than one battery JV plant with GM in North America," without giving details.

GM already has a joint venture in the U.S. with LG Energy Solution, and has been investing to ramp up cell production with the South Korean battery maker to take advantage of subsidies under the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act that aims to boost domestic manufacturing.

The U.S. Energy Department finalized a $2.5 billion loan to the GM-LG Energy JV late last year.

The companies are building a $2.6 billion plant in Michigan, set to open in 2024, one of three JV Ultium Cells LLC plants. They dropped plans for a fourth plant in New Carlisle, Ind., but GM could still pick the site for a battery plant with another partner, Reuters reported in January.

Hyundai Motor and SK On, a battery unit of SK Innovation, plan to set up a battery JV in Georgia, in an investment worth a combined about $5 billion, the two companies said Tuesday.

Hannah Lutz contributed to this report.