Investors charge into battery materials

North American firms making materials for lithium-ion batteries are enjoying a surge of interest from investors. Sila Nanotechnologies, a California-based start-up developing energy-dense, silicon-based anode materials for lithium-ion batteries, has raised $590 million from a slew of investors. Sila plans to use the cash to build a plant in the US with an anode capacity of 100 GW h. “Investing in our next plant today will keep us on track to be powering cars and hundreds of millions of consumer devices by 2025,” Sila CEO Gene Berdichevsky says in a statement. Meanwhile, the Canadian mining company Lithium Americas has raised $400 million in a share offering to help fund a new lithium mine in Thacker Pass, Nevada. Lithium Americas plans to produce 60,000 metric tons per year of lithium carbonate—the starting material for most lithium chemicals—at the site. Albemarle, currently the only US producer of basic lithium chemicals, recently disclosed plans to double its capacity for extracting lithium from brine in Silver Peak, Nevada, by 2025.