Contributed Commentary by Dr. Pradyumna (Prady) Gupta, Infinita Lab, Infinita Materials
April 15, 2026 | Not long ago, I was in a conversation with a procurement manager at a mid-sized battery pack assembler. He could tell me exactly who supplied his cells. He knew the cell format, the chemistry, the cell-to-module configuration. What he could not tell me was where the cobalt in those cells had been refined or which country the graphite had come from. He was not unusual. He was the norm.
That conversation keeps coming back to me as I watch battery supply chain risk graduate from something that lived in sustainability reports to something that is now showing up in quarterly earnings calls and board risk registers. The minerals are not new. The geopolitics are not new. What is new is that manufacturers and operators are feeling the consequences in ways that are difficult to abstract away.
China’s decision in late 2023 to require export licenses for graphite was instructive. It was not a supply cutoff. But it was a demonstration of leverage that no battery manufacturer missed. Graphite makes up roughly 15% to 20% of a lithium-ion cell by weight. Approximately 65% of the natural graphite supply runs through China (https://www.iea.org/reports/global-supply-chains-of-ev-batteries). A licensing requirement is not a crisis in isolation. It is a signal about how quickly a procurement assumption can become a strategic vulnerability.
Cobalt tells a longer version of the same story. The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for roughly 70% of global cobalt mining, and approximately 80% of global cobalt refining runs through Chinese-controlled operations. For years, the industry treated this primarily as an ESG problem: artisanal mining conditions, conflict mineral concerns, and NGO pressure. The 2022 and 2023 cobalt price swings, partly driven by demand speculation and partly by shifting Chinese domestic policy, demonstrated that it is simultaneously a procurement risk that no ESG framework can fully manage.
Chile’s move to nationalize its lithium industry in April 2023 added another chapter. Lithium had seemed safer: multiple geographies, relatively stable governments, transparent contracts. But when lithium prices spiked, and the strategic stakes became undeniable, Santiago reasserted sovereign control. That is not a geopolitical anomaly. It is a pattern. When a mineral becomes strategically important at scale, the countries that host it renegotiate the terms.
Sodium-ion batteries are often presented as the answer to lithium dependency, and there is genuine substance to the argument. CATL began shipping sodium-ion cells into commercial vehicles in China in 2023, and the chemistry has real advantages in cold-temperature performance and cost at the cell level. But sodium ions do not solve the supply chain problem. Cathode materials for sodium-ion, principally layered oxide and Prussian blue analog compounds, carry their own raw material considerations. The dependency shifts; it does not disappear.
So what should manufacturers and operators actually do with all of this? Three things stand out to me.
First, map the supply chain beyond Tier 1. Most battery users know their cell supplier. Far fewer can identify their cathode active material supplier, and almost none have visibility into where the precursor chemicals for that cathode material were synthesized. This is the visibility gap that regulators are beginning to close by mandate: the EU Battery Regulation’s due diligence and traceability requirements and the domestic content thresholds embedded in the US Inflation Reduction Act will make supply chain opacity both commercially and legally untenable within this decade.
Second, treat material substitution as an engineering priority rather than a procurement reaction. The industry has made real structural progress: NMC chemistries have progressively reduced cobalt content, lithium iron phosphate has eliminated it entirely for many applications, and solid-state work continues to promise further optionality. But every substitution requires a qualification cycle: cycle life, thermal stability, abuse tolerance, and performance at temperature extremes. The companies running those evaluations now will have options when the next supply disruption hits. The ones waiting for the disruption to arrive before starting the evaluation will not.
Third, and this is the part that rarely surfaces in supply chain strategy discussions: the testing and validation infrastructure for alternative materials needs to scale proportionally with the industry’s stated ambition to diversify. The bottleneck in supply chain risk mitigation is often not the availability of alternative materials. It is the capacity to rigorously and quickly qualify them. This is an infrastructure investment that the industry has not yet made at the required scale.
Battery supply chain risk is now a boardroom issue because the financial and operational consequences of getting it wrong have become large enough to be undeniable. The minerals are not going to redistribute themselves, and the geopolitics are not going to simplify. What companies can control is their level of preparation: their supply chain visibility, their qualification capability, and their engineering flexibility. Those three things are the difference between having options when the next disruption arrives and scrambling to explain the margin impact afterward.
Dr. Pradyumna (Prady) Gupta is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Infinita Lab and Infinita Materials, where he leads pioneering work in materials characterization, reliability engineering, and advanced manufacturing. With more than two decades of experience spanning semiconductors, electric mobility, and aerospace systems, he focuses on bridging material science with practical reliability needs. Dr. Gupta’s work centers on enabling high-performance, safe, and sustainable material architectures for next-generation technologies. He can be reached at prady@infinitalab.com.
