Ryan Felton

They had built these factories for making batteries intended for electric vehicles.

As the EV market took a downturn, they've moved to repurpose that capacity to make batteries for powering artificial intelligence, data centers, power utilities, large industrial customers, and the like.

And there's a massive need for this sort of product at the moment.

And many other competitors like Tesla, LG Energy, they're working on similar products to meet that sort of need.

And there's just this big opportunity.

There's a lot of upside.

There was just a congressional hearing a few weeks ago about what was described as China's threat to the American auto industry.

The top lobbying group is urging the Trump administration to prevent Chinese companies from coming here.

Given that political reality, it's not just tariffs that might be the thing that holds it up.

What the Biden administration did was impose a extremely hefty tariff on electric vehicle imports.

The Trump administration then imposed additional tariffs.

So, yeah, the tariffs are a big barrier.

But that doesn't change the fact that if you were to build here, you would not be paying the tariff.

It's supposed to go into effect for the 2027 model year, which is what you would start seeing later this year come to market.

Chinese carmakers, if they are willing to find a way to build cars here and localize their supply chain for parts that would be covered by this software ban, that is, you know, at least on paper for now, that's the main barriers.

There have been cars by Volvo and Polestar, for example, which are owned by Geely, sold here already.

Volvo currently has a plant in South Carolina that's pretty underutilized.

So if Geely wanted to bring some of these brands that are popular in China and elsewhere around the world...

To the US, they have a way to start getting cars built here and getting around those tariff barriers much more easily than some counterparts who are in China.

That's for sure going to be the biggest reason why you might not see a Chinese company come here and build a plant to start trying to make cars here.