So GM Reopened the Ohio Battery Plant. Don't Let That Distract You From What Happened to Indiana and Tennessee.

Shawn Henry
Sun, August 16, 2026 



Seven months after the lights went out, General Motors and LG Energy Solution are flipping them back on at their Ultium Cells battery plant in Warren, Ohio. About 1,400 workers will return Monday. Production of the NCMA pouch cells that power the Chevrolet Equinox EV, the Cadillac Lyriq, and most of GM's electric lineup will resume.

Fine. But here's the part nobody's writing about.

While the Warren plant sat idle for seven months, GM was quietly executing one of the most significant restructurings of its battery manufacturing strategy since it announced the whole thing. It sold its stake in a $3.5 billion Indiana battery factory to Samsung SDI — before the plant ever produced a single commercial cell. It invested $70 million to convert its Tennessee Ultium Cells facility from EV batteries to lithium iron phosphate cells for grid-scale energy storage — specifically including power infrastructure for AI data centers.

Ohio came back. Indiana was handed off. Tennessee found a new boss.

This is not a comeback story. It's a liquidation and reallocation.
The Plant That Reached a Milestone and Then Went Dark

The Warren facility is the original Ultium Cells plant — GM and LG Energy Solution's first large-scale US facility, the proving ground, the one they built from a steel skeleton starting in May 2020. At 2.8 million square feet — roughly 45 football fields — it's capable of producing 45 gigawatt hours of cells annually using advanced NCMA chemistry.

By December 2024, the plant had produced its 100 millionth battery cell. A milestone worth celebrating. Six weeks later, production stopped.

The official reason was "weaker EV demand." The actual trigger was more specific: the elimination of the $7,500 federal EV consumer tax credit on September 30, 2025. When Congress axed the credit, GM's EV sales forecasts changed overnight. The company had already built more battery manufacturing capacity than it needed for a slower market, and Warren — with roughly 850 temporary layoffs and 480 permanent cuts — bore the first consequences. Workers who had been told they'd return in June got another delay to August. Now it's actually August.
What they're returning to is a plant that supplies cells for GM's best-selling EVs — a lineup that has shown genuine recovery signs in the second quarter of 2026. Chevrolet and Cadillac EV sales were up meaningfully. The market isn't fixed, but it's not getting worse.

So Ohio makes sense. That's the easy part.
The Factory That Never Shipped a Cell

The Indiana story deserves more scrutiny.

In April 2023, GM and Samsung SDI announced a $3.5 billion joint venture to build a battery factory in New Carlisle, Indiana. The plant was designed to produce prismatic nickel-rich cells — a different format than the pouch cells made in Ohio — under Samsung's PRiMX brand. Mass production was scheduled to begin in 2027. The facility was expected to employ over 1,600 people and produce 27 gigawatt hours annually, with potential to scale to 36 GWh.

This week, Samsung SDI acquired GM's roughly 50 percent stake. The purchase price was not disclosed.

The Indiana plant has not shipped a single production battery cell. GM committed to a $3.5 billion factory, spent roughly three years reconsidering, and then walked away before the thing opened. Samsung SDI is keeping the plant — converting part of it to energy storage system batteries — and the two companies signed a separate agreement to jointly develop next-generation prismatic batteries. So GM still gets the technology. It just doesn't own the factory.

Think about what that means from a manufacturing strategy standpoint. GM essentially co-funded Samsung SDI's first wholly owned battery factory in North America, then handed it back and said, "We'll buy cells from you." That is a remarkable reversal for a company that spent years insisting domestic battery ownership was non-negotiable.
Tennessee Found a Different Customer

The Spring Hill, Tennessee Ultium Cells plant tells the most surprising chapter of the three.

In March 2026, GM and LG Energy Solution announced they were investing $70 million to convert part of the Tennessee facility to produce lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells — not for EVs, but for stationary energy storage systems. Grid projects. Renewable energy installations. And specifically, power infrastructure for AI data centers. By July, the plant had started LFP cell production.

LFP chemistry is cheaper, longer-lasting in cycle terms, and more thermally stable than the NCMA chemistry used for EV applications. It's ideal for large stationary storage installations that utility companies and data center operators need. It gives up energy density — a problem for a car, a non-issue for a warehouse full of battery racks.

Here's the irony that should stop you cold: the technology that many argue is responsible for accelerating electricity demand and straining grids — AI computing — is now the paying customer keeping an American EV battery factory operating. The EV slowdown created idle factory capacity. AI's relentless appetite for electricity created demand for exactly the kind of batteries that idle factory could pivot to make. One problem fed the other's solution.

GM and LG didn't save Tennessee from the EV market. AI did.
The First Unionized Battery Contract in American History — Then Layoffs Six Months Later

There's one more detail in the Warren story worth acknowledging.

In June 2024, the UAW ratified its contract at the Ultium Cells plant in Warren. It was, by any measure, a historic moment: the first unionized battery manufacturing contract in American history. Workers at a facility that didn't exist four years earlier had secured union representation and a collectively bargained agreement.

Six months later, they were laid off.

That's not a criticism of the union, GM, or LG. It's a reflection of how quickly the economics of EV manufacturing can shift. The $7,500 federal tax credit wasn't just an incentive for consumers. It was the load-bearing wall of GM's near-term EV demand projections. When Congress removed it in September 2025, the wall came down and the production schedule collapsed with it.

Those workers are going back now. But the sequence — ratify the first union battery contract in the country, hit 100 million cells, get laid off within half a year — captures the volatility of building a career in a market that depends as much on congressional arithmetic as on consumer demand.

What This Is Actually About

The Warren restart will be reported as good news, and it is. Jobs are returning. EV cells are flowing again. GM's electric lineup — the Equinox EV, Silverado EV, Blazer EV, Cadillac Lyriq, Vistiq, and the GMC electric vehicles — has enough consumer demand to justify running the plant built for exactly this purpose.

But step back from the individual plant and look at the portfolio. A year ago, GM owned three major Ultium Cells facilities in the United States. Now it owns two, and one of those two has been partially converted to serve AI data centers instead of car buyers.

That's not an EV strategy. That's a battery company strategy. GM is repositioning itself less as an automaker that happens to make batteries and more as an entity that manages battery manufacturing assets across multiple end markets: consumer EVs, commercial EVs, grid storage, AI infrastructure. Whether that's a smart adaptation to a turbulent market or a quiet signal that the original EV ambition has been permanently downgraded is the question nobody is asking Monday morning in Warren.

The Ohio restart isn't the answer. It's the last line of a three-chapter story most readers never followed.

The real test is whether Tennessee's AI batteries and Indiana's Samsung hand-off generate enough revenue and technology returns to hold the broader strategy together until EV demand catches back up to where GM originally projected it would be by now.

Nobody clocking back in at Warren Monday morning is thinking about that. They're thinking about getting back to work.

Which is, honestly, the most reasonable possible response.

Ferrari’s first electric car sells for £30m

Andrea Vogt
Sun, August 16, 2026 

THE TELEGRAPH


The Maranello carmaker had the last laugh over critics of the car


Ferrari's first all-electric car was met with derision, mockery and an 8 per cent fall in the company share price when it was unveiled in May. But that hasn't dampened its sale price.

The Luce was described as "an aesthetic and technological insult to anyone who loves Ferrari" by a former company executive, as it was compared to a Nissan Leaf.

But the Maranello carmaker had the last laugh over the weekend as the first Luce in the run sold for $40m (£30m), making it the most expensive new car ever sold at auction.

The sale astonished the crowd at the Monterey Car Week in California, which had expected the "tailor-made" version of the car to go for around £750,000.

"Tailor-made" cars are one-of-a-kind vehicles customised to a buyer's precise specifications. The model, with chassis number 0, was designed with LoveFrom, the studio founded by Jony Ive, Apple's former design chief and a key figure behind the iPhone and iMac.

Rumours swirled that the purchaser of the car might have been a billionaire close to the project

The RM Sotheby's charity auction for the Luce, in mother-of-pearl white, saw bids start at $1m and race up, sometimes in increments as big as $5m.

It closed at $40m after a brief but intense bidding war in which a young man with a West Coast accent, chewing gum and wearing a black suit, yelled out "thirty," "thirty-five" and then "forty" between hushed conversation with someone on the other end of his iPhone.

"Going for the third and final time, here, only as can be done at RM Sotheby's, the car is sold," said Sholto Gilbertson, a British auctioneer, bringing the hammer down on the record-breaking sale.

No buyer's name has been disclosed, but rumours swirled on Sunday that the purchaser might have been a Silicon Valley billionaire close to the project, such as Apple's Tim Cook or entrepreneur Laurene Powell Jobs.

Proceeds will be donated to "elevating global education initiatives" via the Ferrari Foundation.

The backlash began almost immediately.

"Wow, 40 million for a washing machine with a Ferrari logo. Unbelievable," commented Fernando Sánchez, a Spanish investor, under the auction house's Instagram reel.

Regular versions of the Luce were on sale for £470,000. In May, at the unveiling, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the company's former chairman, said the Luce "risks destroying the myth" of Ferrari, and even suggested it should be stripped of the company's prancing horse logo.

No buyer name has been disclosed for the buyer of the Ferrari Luce

Ferrari's marketing chief quit after the reaction to the company's first fully electric vehicle.

Enrico Galliera, a 16-year veteran of the supercar maker, has been replaced by Massimiliano Di Silvestre, BMW's former head of Italian operations, after the disastrous launch of the Luce.

But Benedetto Vigna, Ferrari's chief executive, has vigorously defended the Luce, saying the company is already receiving orders and deflected any comparison to cheaper electric cars, saying: "You have to see it and drive it to understand that it wasn't copied – not the interiors, not the exterior, not the performance."

The car is a four-door saloon with four electric motors and a 122kWh battery, which provide a top speed of 190mph. It can reach 62mph in just 2.5 seconds and has a range of 329 miles when fully charged.

Although a record sale for a new car, it is not the most expensive car ever sold.

In 2023, a vintage 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO was bought for £42m, and in January, a "unicorn" one-of-one 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO Bianco Speciale sold for £32,855,797 to a mystery buyer.

The most expensive car ever sold at auction was a 1955 Mercedes 300 SLR Coupé modelled on the race car that Sir Stirling Moss broke the Mille Miglia record in. That was sold for €135m (£115m) in 2022.