The Pentagon has given battery-materials company 6K conditional approval for a $250 million loan to build a factory in Tennessee — money for a manufacturing process that bets on microwaves instead of Chinese supply chains.
6K, based in North Andover, Massachusetts, is twelve years old. It uses microwaves to heat metals into a plasma and then deposits them onto a surface. That cuts the number of steps needed to make cathode material — the component that sets a cell's cost and energy density — and the company says it works across several battery chemistries, including lithium iron phosphate.
It is not the company's first public money. In 2023 6K received a $50 million grant from the Department of Energy under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That grant was cancelled in the Trump administration's sweep of Biden-era awards, forcing the company to reapply. The plant was originally supposed to open in 2024; the cancellation and uncertainty in the EV market forced it to rejigger the plans.
Two caveats matter. The approval is conditional, not a closed deal — the sum can still change or evaporate. And it is a loan, not a grant: the money comes back, which turns building domestic cathode capacity into a debt the company has to service out of production.
The logic underneath is less industrial policy than logistics. Batteries are everywhere on a battlefield now, and the Department of Defense wants capacity that cannot be squeezed by export controls or by a port on the other side of the Pacific.
