The largest electric-vehicle investment in Indiana's history is a finished building with no machinery in it. General Motors and Samsung SDI announced the plant in April 2023 and finalized a $3.5 billion joint venture on a 680-acre site outside New Carlisle: 27 gigawatt-hours of cells to start, more than 1,600 jobs, mass production in 2027.
Then American EV demand came in under plan, construction stopped, and on August 11 GM sold its 49.99 percent stake to its partner and walked. Bloomberg reported GM had spent about $300 million on the site. What it had bought was a shell.
So Samsung SDI owns a half-built factory outright, and on Friday it filed to raise 4.45 trillion won, about $3.2 billion — not from a bank, not from a bond. It is selling 13.09 million shares of Samsung Display, a third of what it holds, back to Samsung Display itself, at 340,000 won each, settling in cash on Thursday. The buyer makes screens for phones and televisions and will never use a battery cell. It is not acquiring anything, it is retiring its own stock, and Samsung SDI's claim on it drops from 15.2 percent to 10.2 percent, which looks like one arm of the group cashing out of another to pay for machines.
And here the filing goes quiet. Samsung SDI said the proceeds are for securing future growth and named nothing else — not Indiana, not any plant, not any number. The link to New Carlisle is what the Korean market assumes, not what the company disclosed. Shares were up more than 8 percent in Seoul on Monday morning on an assumption.
What is disclosed is stranger. When Samsung SDI took full control of the Indiana site, it said the plant would open by making energy-storage batteries, the kind that sit outside data centers holding power for the grid. The factory Indiana won to supply electric cars will start its life supplying the electricity business. This is now a pattern: in February, Stellantis sold its 49 percent of the Windsor battery plant to LG Energy Solution for one hundred dollars, and LG began pointing that one at storage too.
The American battery buildout of 2022 and 2023 is not being torn down. It is being handed over cheaply to Korean suppliers who found a different customer, and an empty building turns out to be the easiest kind to repurpose. It can become whatever the demand turns out to be. The demand turned out not to be cars.
The factory Indiana won to supply electric cars will start its life supplying the electricity business.
