"Bill Gates' $1B Battery Venture Fails After 14 Years"

Recently, there has been a significant development in the American tech industry: a battery company invested in by the renowned Bill Gates has gone bankrupt. However, it is currently a golden age for the development of batteries, so why couldn't they continue?

Many people say that batteries don't have much technological content, so how could Americans fail at making batteries? This case is particularly typical, and the more fundamental question is why American manufacturing fails. Americans not only can't make batteries, but they also can't do many other things anymore.

Recently, Ambri, known as the "pioneer of liquid metal batteries," announced bankruptcy.

The company once made a grand promise to replace lithium batteries and quickly became a star company in the battery industry, attracting more than $1 billion in investment, including from oil giant Total, the U.S. Department of Energy, and Bill Gates, who invested in three rounds.

Ultimately, after 14 years of establishment, it fell at the peak moment of new energy.

Why did this company go bankrupt? On the surface, there are two reasons, but fundamentally, there is only one reason.

The two superficial reasons are, first, the technology route and, second, the cost issue.

Let's talk about the technology route first. Lithium-ion batteries have achieved large-scale commercialization, but due to their obvious flaws, they have always been considered a transitional technology route.

What are the flaws of lithium-ion batteries? Simply put, they have low energy density, small capacity, short cycle life, and are prone to overheating, etc., which sounds quite unreliable, right? However, it is also the technology route that is easiest to achieve large-scale commercialization.

Because lithium-ion batteries have obvious flaws, researchers worldwide are trying other solutions, such as Japan's hydrogen energy batteries and the liquid metal batteries of this American company.Ambri's liquid metal battery technology, which is actually developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, overcomes the shortcomings of lithium batteries and boasts advantages such as large capacity, low cost, ease of manufacturing, and long cycle life.

With so many obvious advantages, why hasn't Ambri succeeded?

In addition to the inherent difficulty and high comprehensive costs of this technological approach, there is a second issue involved: cost.

After Ambri's bankruptcy, the company explained the reasons for the financial burn, stating that although the cost of the battery product itself is lower than that of lithium batteries, the cost of building factories is high.

In summary, Ambri presented a technology route that claimed to be better, but after 14 years, it still couldn't be realized, the product didn't hit the market, and commercialization was not achieved.

In fact, the technological route and cost are only superficial reasons. The real reason for Ambri's demise is strikingly similar to the reason why Tesla almost died back then.

At that time, Tesla even had a mature product and controlled costs, but it couldn't achieve mass production. It was only after establishing the Gigafactory in Shanghai, China, that it was revived.

If Ambri had moved to China a couple of years earlier, it might have succeeded like Tesla. Is this to say that China is superior to the United States? Of course, it's not that simple.

Why couldn't Tesla in the United States cross the threshold of mass production back then? The answer lies in the supply chain and production efficiency.

Behind Tesla's car production is a long supply chain. To ultimately produce Tesla cars at the desired cost and scale up production capacity, it requires a complete, efficient, and low-cost supply chain.Not only that, but on Tesla's ultimate Gigafactory production line, it must also be able to achieve large-scale production at a low cost.

This is not just a matter of the industrial chain itself, but also requires a large number of skilled and cost-effective technical workers.

Looking at the world, only China can meet all these conditions.

Lithium batteries are the same, they do not have too high a technological content, to put it bluntly, it is to solve the problems of energy density and safety. Why is it that only CATL and BYD have achieved great success worldwide?

The answer is that we control the entire industrial chain from mining, processing and refining, to battery production. In this process, technology is controllable, standards are controllable, safety is controllable, and costs are controllable. In the end, we can produce lithium batteries that no one can compete with.

So the case of Ambri is very typical, it reflects the common problems of why American manufacturing fails.

Behind this is the current global manufacturing industry chain, as well as the issues of costs and skilled technical workers. Today's United States no longer has these key foundational conditions.

So while we become the world's factory, we also control a large amount of minerals and industrial chains, and have cultivated a huge group of skilled technical workers. This is not that we want to control something, but a process that is passively generated.

Made in China is of good quality and low price, and is popular worldwide. But if you don't do these things, you won't get the desired results.

The model of developed countries such as the United States is to integrate the global industrial chain with technology, cooperate and assemble production, and the result is a product like Boeing, which is very expensive and prone to various problems.This is why American manufacturing fails, and also the true secret behind why Chinese manufacturing outperforms the world.