AI datacenters devour electricity, and the US grid is old: 70% of large transformers are past 25 years, and a new one takes three years to arrive. So Big Tech is skipping the grid, putting generators and giant batteries (ESS) on-site instead. The problem: over 90% of those batteries were Chinese. Meru walks through the three-part policy set the US rolled out to flip that board. One, tax credits now require the Chinese share of components to shrink every year. Two, tariffs raised the cost of Chinese cells. Three, subsidies for US-made batteries pushed Korean-made prices below Chinese ones. The projected result is dramatic: Korean share of US ESS batteries hits 61% next year and 85% the year after. Meru adds the caveats, though: Korea's big three battery makers still overbuilt their factories, and over 90% of the raw materials still come from China.
Why it matters · AI datacenters created the storage demand; US industrial policy just decided who supplies it. This is the power-infrastructure trade behind the compute trade.