The Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital announced two conditional loan commitments on November 5, one for battery materials and one for semiconductor wafers, each structured to draw in an equal amount of private capital alongside the government’s money.
The larger commitment is 250 million dollars to 6K Inc. to scale domestic production of nickel manganese cobalt cathode active material at its PlusCAM facility in Jackson, Tennessee. 6K’s UniMelt microwave plasma process makes single crystal cathode powder in one step, bypassing the foreign dominated precursor stage, and the department said the financing would catalyse a further 250 million dollars of private capital. The United States currently produces less than 1 percent of its cathode material needs domestically, a gap the release attributes to price flooding by foreign producers.
The second commitment is 75 million dollars to Halo Industries to scale production of silicon carbide wafers in Santa Clara, California, crowding in a further 75 million dollars of private capital. Halo slices silicon carbide ingots with a proprietary laser process rather than diamond saws, which it says cuts material waste and raises throughput up to tenfold. Silicon carbide wafers feed high voltage power electronics used in radar, electronic warfare, hypersonics and directed energy systems, as well as AI infrastructure.
Neither commitment is a closed loan. Both specify customary further steps, including financial, legal, technical and diligence requirements, before financial close. The pattern is the point: the Office of Strategic Capital, which signed a 150 million dollar commitment with LeoLabs earlier in the week, is acting as a state lender of patient capital in supply chains where private finance alone has not built domestic capacity at competitive cost.