The car you drive years in the future might run off a battery being invented in a lab today. Companies in China and the United States are racing to perfect and scale up next-generation technologies.

Elon Musk identified the need for what he dubbed a “gigafactory” to produce huge volumes of battery cells as early as 2013. Tesla brought its cell partner, Panasonic, into the Reno gigafactory while every other automaker was still buying cells shipped from battery suppliers. Reno started supplying 2170 cells for Model 3 production in January 2017.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., or CATL, controls more than a third of the global market for EV batteries and is seeking to expand overseas even as it faces political obstacles in the United States.

The intellectual concept was done by the great people in the great country of the United States of America — not in China,' Texas professor says.

Instead, he’d worked at Tesla because of its bigger vision for sustainable energy—how battery storage and ... there’s still a lot of greenfield development opportunity for energy infrastructure.