For decades, China’s strategy in semiconductors followed a familiar pattern: identify critical American technologies, replicate them through state-subsidized manufacturing and forced technology transfer, flood global markets with cheaper alternatives, and wait for U.S. firms to lose the capital and the will to compete. Batteries are next, and the playbook is already running.
Over the past several years, the United States has committed tens of billions of dollars to rebuild domestic battery manufacturing and secure critical mineral supply chains – advanced energy storage now powers data centers, military equipment, the electric grid, and the industrial base beneath it all. Dependence on a foreign entity for that infrastructure is a national security vulnerability, not merely an economic one.
But investment alone cannot close that vulnerability if the underlying intellectual property walks out the door. What cannot be rebuilt is the years of research and engineering that produce genuinely superior technology. That is precisely what is being targeted.
Silicon-carbon battery materials represent one of the most significant advances in energy storage in decades. They can deliver 50 percent more energy density than conventional lithium-ion chemistries and can enable batteries that charge from zero to full in 90 seconds. A single ton of the material performs the work of five tons of traditional graphite. This technology was developed in the United States. It is now being stolen in China.
My company has spent years developing and patenting this class of materials, yet we have identified over 100 manufacturers in China suspected of producing materials that appear to infringe our patents. In a single shipping corridor, infringing material has been entering U.S. markets at a rate of 60 to 70 metric tons per month — approaching $100 million annually from technology invented here. This is a systematic, state-backed piracy of American innovation before our industry can scale.
We are far from alone in tracking this threat. Sila Nanotechnologies’ recently filed a formal complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission alongside parallel federal lawsuits against Carbon One New Energy (C-ONE) — validation that this is not a series of isolated disputes, but an aggressive, sector-wide assault forcing U.S. companies to fund massive litigation just to block copycat imports before their gigafactories can mature. We support Sila’s actions to protect its market opportunities.
The broader pattern requires a policy response that matches its scale, because no single company can absorb the cost of being an early mover in a market where the rules are tilted against it. The core problem is not that the United States lacks legal tools. Customs enforcement, trade secret protections under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, and ITC proceedings all exist for precisely this purpose. Those mechanisms were built for a slower, less coordinated threat.
This matters acutely for capital formation. When venture capital and private equity evaluate whether to fund the next American startup, they now ask whether the technology is defensible — and if a foreign government can subsidize its way to cost parity in a few years, the investment case deteriorates. Breakthrough technologies stop getting funded, and the industrial base hollows out.
Chinese companies currently control roughly 90 percent of the global anode material market. That dominance was not built on superior technology but on two decades of state-backed manufacturing subsidies, forced technology transfer, and the patient displacement of American competitors who could not match artificially suppressed prices. The same approach is now targeting silicon-carbon materials, before a U.S. industry can establish itself. .
The Trump administration has taken meaningful steps on the investment side, making available $500 million through the Department of Energy to expand domestic battery materials processing. The enforcement side needs to match it.
Congress can do two things. Expanding grant funding through the Department of Energy would help manufacturers keep pace in R&D even as they bear the high cost of IP enforcement — a real bottleneck for small and mid-size companies with legitimate claims but limited litigation budgets. Congress should also apply direct diplomatic and economic pressure on China to reform its court system, ensuring that U.S. companies get fair treatment rather than operating in a state-backed haven for infringers.
Investment builds capacity, and enforcement protects it. Without both, federal dollars flow into technologies that get copied abroad, scaled with state subsidies, and sold back into U.S. markets at prices no domestic firm can match. It’s displacement disguised as competition.
The nation that controls advanced energy storage will shape where manufacturing capacity concentrates, where supply chains form, and who sets the terms of the global energy economy for decades to come. The United States has invested real money to not cede that position. It should invest equal seriousness in protecting that investment. We are on the precipice of another revolution in electric storage; the single question before us is whether we will allow this one to be stolenas well.