SPECIAL SILVER REPORT: Samsung’s Breakthrough Silver-Carbon Anode Solid State Batteries Go Online in
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All right, this is Mike Adams.
Welcome to this special report about Samsung's new solid-state battery technology using silver carbon anode technology to, well, to increase energy density for one thing, and also charging speed and also the number of cycles, etc.
So we're going to talk about this technology now, and what this has to do with silver demand and silver pricing and also the timeline of this.
The reason this is a very big deal right now is because silver, as I'm recording this, is just touching about $70 per ounce.
That's a troy ounce, by the way, which is different than another ounce.
That's why I strongly prefer the metric system because a kilogram is always a kilogram.
But in the imperial system, ounces are not always ounces, which is confusing.
But anyway, silver is sold as a troy ounce, and there are apparently right around 32 of those in one kilo.
So in case you're wondering, like a kilo of silver is about 32 silver coins or so-called one-ounce silver coins.
Okay, so with silver hitting about $70 per troy ounce, or very close to that, even we've had a lot of discussion about what's going on with silver.
And I've talked about silver demand for the solar industry and why that's critical because solar energy is the only energy source that can be rapidly upscaled to power data centers that are necessary for the race to superintelligence.
And I'm not going to go into all the details here, but in previous reports, I've mentioned I've compared many different sources of possible energy, and none of them work quickly enough to compete with China in the race to superintelligence.
None of them work other than solar.
In other words, nuclear power, you know, 15 to 20 years out.
Hot fusion power, who knows?
Maybe one day, maybe in the year 2075.
Fission, small modular reactors, fission, yeah, those work.
Those are available now, but they're not available in large enough sizes to really power all the data centers, and they can still take many years for permitting and so on.
You still have to swap out the nuclear fuel rods so there's security issues there and possible dirty bomb potential and terrorism, that kind of thing.
Then there's gas turbines that burn natural gas in order to generate electricity.
Gas turbines, as we established in a previous podcast, the wait time on those, depending on the output rating, is anywhere from three years to now almost 10 years.
So forget that.
And the three years on that, those are the smaller gas turbines that are not really going to be helpful.
If you want a large gas turbine to power a large data center, you're going to need to wait easily five, six, seven years at this point.
So that puts us well into the early 2030s.
And by that time, the race to superintelligence, it's already over.
Probably is my guess.
And then there's other kinds of generators, diesel generators, etc.
None of these can scale.
Solar can scale.
Solar can be deployed very quickly within a few months if you've got the solar panels.
And if you combine it with battery storage technology for grid shifting, then you can actually power data centers with solar alone.
Although it's expensive, it's doable.
It's a lot more expensive than grid power, but it's still feasible.
So that's why right now there's huge demand for silver from the solar manufacturing giants in both China and India and a few other countries, but mostly it's China and India.
So that explains silver demand from the solar industry and why suddenly there's this massive ramp up and why solar manufacturers in India and China are scrambling to acquire physical stockpiles of silver.
Not silver coins, but just sometimes unrefining silver dore, you know, just sort of silver coming out of the mines even before refining.
They're stockpiling that stuff too, because they just need the silver.
Everybody realizes it.
Okay.
Now, as if that weren't enough of a driver, we've also talked about how silver is used in telecommunications and electronics and, of course, conductive components that are on circuit boards, etc.
It's used in data centers.
It's used in weapons.
The military industrial complex uses a tremendous amount of silver.
I mean, only a small amount per cruise missile, let's say, but in the aggregate, it's a large amount of silver.
There's also silver in other areas of technology and medicine and computing, etc.
Okay.
But that's already been known for a long time.
What's new is, or relatively new, is this Samsung announcement of silver carbon composite layers to be used as the anode of lithium-ion batteries.
So this is a lithium-ion battery that is vastly improved by adding a silver carbon composite layer as the anode, which allows the lithium to be a solid state instead of a sloshy liquid type of thing.
And then they no longer produce the dendrites from the anode that leads to degradation of battery capacity and also problems with recharging.
So as a result, the new Samsung battery technology, which was announced by the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, and this was, by the way, this was announced back in 2020, okay?
So this isn't actually a new tech.
What's new is that they're going to start mass producing it.
And I'll tell you about that schedule because that's going to drive silver well over $100 an ounce in my view.
But I'll share with you why I've reached that conclusion.
And you are free to agree or disagree.
But anyway, this was announced in 2020.
And so as a result, they can use these ultra-thin silver carbon composite layers that are only five micrometers thick.
Pretty amazing.
And this means they can really sharply reduce the thickness of the anode overall.
And they can increase the density of the battery to 900 watt hours per liter, which is really extraordinary.
900 watt hours per liter.
I mean, it wasn't that many years ago that we were looking at maybe 100 watt hours per liter, and then it got better at 200, 200 plus.
I don't know where it is right now, but 900 is a big deal.
So it means that the batteries that go into EVs can be 50% smaller by volume, 50% smaller.
That's also a huge deal for safety.
And, you know, it weighs less and it's less likely to be destroyed in an accident, etc.
And also, according to this, that even at 50% reduced size, Samsung has estimated that an EV, a typical EV, could travel 800 kilometers on a single charge and a life cycle of over 1,000 charges, which that's actually improved since 2020.
And then on top of that, the recharge time is only nine minutes to get most of the capacity charged up if you have a very powerful charger.
So all of these are huge things.
So here's where all of this gets really, really interesting.
So Samsung SDI, that is the battery manufacturing group of Samsung, has confirmed that they are going to begin mass production of this new silver-based solid-state battery in 2027.
So it's still over a year away.
And what that means is that the silver bull market is probably only barely getting started.
I mean, seriously, when they start cranking production of these batteries, you're looking at an estimated one kilo of silver going into every EV, one kilo, because there's about five grams of silver per battery unit and a typical EV pack needs 200 cells.
So that's 1,000 grams or one kilogram, hence the name, because I'm speaking to an American audience.
So in any case, you're going to need a kilo of silver, which is 32 ounces.
Now, if 32 ounces of silver costs, let's say, let's just say $100 an ounce, that's $3,200, obviously, right?
That's just in the silver that's going into the battery.
So that means the silver alone in the EV is worth thousands or will be worth thousands of dollars.
It's going to add to the price of the vehicle rather substantially.
But the performance gains are going to be worth it for most buyers.
You have extended range, you know, you have reduced volume, you have rapid recharge, and you have better life cycle of the battery.
So as a result, the Samsung CNT Group, which is the trading and construction arm of Samsung Group, they have, and this is confirmed, they have entered a silver supply deal from a mine in Mexico called, or located in La Parilla.
So let's see.
So this is, let's see, Samsung did a deal with the Canadian company called Silver Storm Mining, and that company has, they're going to restart production at its silver mine in Durango, Mexico, and that mine is called La Parilla.
And that deal was announced in October of this year.
So Samsung is going to receive 100% of the lead, silver, and zinc concentrates produced at La Parilla over the next two years once the mine is restarted.
So in other words, yes, silver mining is going to increase here with this mine, but none of that silver is going into the retail market.
You know, this isn't going to provide supply for consumers or anybody other than Samsung.
All this silver is going directly to Samsung.
And then they're going to have to line up all the refining and everything else.
This is a big undertaking.
And Samsung has announced in Japan, this was earlier in the year in March, Samsung SDI announced a 200 billion won capital raise.
That's 1.4 billion US dollars roughly in order to raise funds for this project of setting up the manufacturing of these batteries.
So in other words, Samsung is not messing around here.
Now, Samsung already has experience manufacturing this because they ran a pilot program in Korea in 2022.
This pilot program was at the SDI R ⁇ D Center located in Suwan.
And it's about a, reportedly a 6,500 square meter production line.
And then in 2023, Samsung SDI supplied samples of the batteries produced at that line to customers so that customers can begin the process of engineering testing and integration into their products, including vehicles.
Now, probably this is going to go into robots too.
Now, see, this is the other side of this whole conversation.
When you can reduce the volume of a battery by 50%, you can stick it in a robot chest.
Yeah, or wherever it goes in the robot, in the robot.
It's probably in the chest.
It's in the torso somewhere, you would imagine.
Probably in the back, you know, where you can swap it out easily.
Anyway, if you can pack essentially, you know, 50% more power into the same space into a robot, now robotics makes a lot more sense.
And Samsung, clearly, these cells that they are manufacturing, these cells could be combined into a giant battery pack for an EV car or a battery pack for EV trucks or a smaller battery pack for robots.
And that's, I believe, although this hasn't been announced, but I believe that's what Samsung is doing with this.
So they're not just gearing up for EV vehicles, or I guess that's redundant, sorry, for electric vehicles.
They're gearing up for robotics.
So you might be asking the question that once the La Parija mine is reopened and producing silver, how much silver can it produce?
And is this enough to supply Samsung with all the silver it needs to provide all the battery packs to all the EV manufacturers and robot makers around the world?
And of course, I've done the research on that.
Well, I mean, I've used AI agents to do that research.
And the answer is no, it's not even close.
So the answer is it's estimated that somewhere between 80 to maybe 100,000 kilos of silver could come out of that mine each year.
That's still a lot of silver.
You know, if you have 100,000 kilos of silver, that's a lot of silver.
But that's only enough for 100,000 EV battery packs per year, which is, I mean, how many EVs are produced in a year?
Millions, millions across the world.
So this silver supply isn't going to cover, you know, the global demand for silver in EV batteries, not even close.
Now, it's going to help Samsung tremendously, but there are other battery manufacturers like Catl out of China or BYD, et cetera, that, and that's, you know, Catl, C-A-T-L, that's where Tesla gets some of its batteries.
They're going to have to find other sources.
And they are also doing deals with mines behind the scenes in order to get their supply of silver.
The bottom line is the reason all these companies are scrambling to do this is because they know that silver is hitting massive global scarcity.
And the solution to global scarcity of silver for these manufacturers, the solution is to allow silver or even hope that silver goes much higher in price.
Why?
Why do they want silver to go much higher in price?
Because that's what convinces people to sell their silver into the system.
You're not going to convince people to let go of their silver until it's, you know, $100 an ounce or more.
At that point, when it hits 100, there might be some people, maybe some of you listening, you might say, well, hey, I bought this stuff at 20.
Now it's 100.
That's a 500% return.
I'm going to sell now.
And you might be wise to do so.
I don't know.
Depends on what's happening at the time.
But at $100 an ounce, a lot more people are going to suddenly find silver to sell.
Or they're going to dig it up or wherever they have it.
They're going to take it out of vaults.
They're going to gather up silver spoons.
Everything that's silver.
They're going to turn it in.
And then that's going to be bought by companies that then sort of re-smelt that silver back into an industrial form to go into the robots and the EVs.
Now, if $100 an ounce silver is not enough to generate all of that, then the price is just going to keep going higher.
And the truth is that annual demand for silver, I believe, in industrial uses is hundreds of millions of ounces.
But let me ask an AI agent to research that.
Okay, I paused while that ran, and sure enough, industrial demand for silver in 2024 was 680 million ounces.
So, I mean, I was right that it was hundreds of millions of ounces, but I didn't realize it was that large.
So, 680 million ounces of silver.
Whereas, let's see, the Samsung silver mine is going to produce maybe 100,000 kilos of silver, which is, of course, only a tiny fraction of 680 million ounces.
Again, God, I hate ounces.
Why can't we all just use units that make sense?
But anyway, that's metals.
So, if you're wondering where all that silver goes in industry, check this out.
So, electronics and electrical use, which is semiconductors and 5G and AI chips and stuff like that, that's about 450 million ounces a year, which is the largest use of industrial silver.
And then, photovoltaics, solar energy, is about 200 million ounces.
So, what that means, I mean, think about this.
That means that when all these EV batteries come online, the solid-state batteries, you know, with the silver carbon anodes, there's not excess silver anywhere.
There's no extra silver sitting around or being produced that somebody can tap into.
It just doesn't exist.
And the annual production of silver is a tiny amount.
So, in other words, if you do the math, and I asked the AI to do it, the La Parija mine, if it outputs 93,000 kilos of silver per year, that's less than one half of 1% of global mine production for silver.
It's not even one half of 1% of industrial demand.
Okay, so it's a drop in the bucket.
But Samsung's doing that because silver is about to go crazy scarce.
And by crazy scarce, what I mean is, you know, unless aliens arrive, unless billions of people die, unless there's World War III, unless there's some major, major economic shockwave that just crushes humanity, demand for silver through all of these vectors, industry, microchips, data centers, solar panels, EVs, batteries, et cetera, et cetera.
The demand is going to freaking skyrocket in 2027 when Samsung brings these plants online.
And what that probably means to me, again, this is my personal conclusion, so don't take this as financial advice, but I believe that whatever silver does price-wise between now and 2027 when Samsung goes online, it will skyrocket again when Samsung announces that it's bringing that plant online, you know, to produce the silver cathode or silver carbon anodes, excuse me.
Too many terms here.
At that point, silver may go to $200 an ounce.
I'm just guessing.
Who knows?
There's a lot that could happen between now and then.
But I could see silver at $100 an ounce easily in 2026.
And then I could see it at $200 an ounce in 2027.
Because at $200 an ounce, then even more people will find silver to sell.
And even more silver production will be shifted into the battery tech and out of other areas such as electronics, etc.
But this is going to create a global supply crunch on silver.
And it's going to drive prices of silver much, much higher, significantly higher.
Whereas when you and I were buying silver at $20, not that long ago, you know, two years ago, whatever it was, $20, that could go 10X by 2027 into $200 an ounce.
So, yeah.
And that would also mean that the amount of silver that goes into a typical EV would be worth over $6,000 just in the batteries alone.
So if you thought it was crazy that people steal catalytic converters off of cars right now because of the platinum, wait until the thieves figure out how to process car batteries, you know, EVs.
They're going to pull thousands of dollars of silver out of the EVs.
They're going to steal cars just for the silver.
Oh my goodness.
But I guess you have to be a breaking bad chemist to get the silver out of the batteries because it's not like it's just sitting there.
It's built into the carbon laminate anode layers.
So good luck.
You're going to need some harsh acids probably.
Like some labs in the Midwest will probably shift from making meth to like pulling silver out of car batteries from stolen cars or something.
I could see that happening.
All right.
So what could clobber this plan, you might be asking?
How could this whole plan collapse?
Well, it could collapse if somebody develops a new technology that's better than Samsung's tech that doesn't use silver.
And for example, I've talked about sodium ion batteries, which are great, great chemistry.
They rely on sodium.
But the problem with sodium ion batteries is that they use more volume than lithium.
So they don't have the energy density of Samsung's solid state batteries, not even close.
So lithium, I'm sorry, sodium ion batteries are great for grid operators or solar farms that want to grid shift or time shift solar production using batteries that are built on site that are shipped in 20 foot or 40 foot containers.
That's what sodium ion batteries are really great at.
They don't use any lithium.
They don't need any silver.
They're very low cost, relatively speaking, once they scale up.
And they can cycle many, many times, like even 8,000 or 10,000 times, some of them.
So it's great for that, but not so great for putting in a vehicle or putting in a robot because it's too heavy and it's too large.
So that's where the solid-state Samsung batteries are going to come into play.
And you can imagine Samsung is also going to roll out this battery tech for all kinds of edge devices, mobile phones and tablets and laptops, you know, everything you can imagine is going to end up with these improved batteries sooner or later.
And they're all going to have silver in them.
And worldwide demand for silver is just going to absolutely skyrocket.
So, you know, people who want to drive a car that has the performance of the solid-state batteries, they're going to pay thousands of dollars for the silver in the batteries.
But there might be cheaper cars that are running on sodium ion that the battery pack is just more bulky, you know?
But it's going to be thousands of dollars cheaper.
And that's a very viable option.
Actually, I think sodium ion batteries could be great in a truck or like an SUV or something where you've got more space to stack them in there, you know, under the floor or whatever.
Whereas in a little tiny city vehicle, you don't really have much space.
Like you open the trunk, it's full of batteries.
Oh my God, we don't have a trunk.
Yeah, they put too much junk in your trunk.
And your trunk is sagging too.
It's sagging because you got all those batteries in your trunk.
You're driving around town with your ass hanging out.
That's the problem.
So that's why sodium ion is not going to be very popular in EVs.
That is, you know, when Samsung's solid-state batteries come online.
So there you go.
Oh, let me see if there's anything else that I found in my research on this.
Let's see.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, there is something else here.
Samsung has estimated how much silver is going to be needed just for this battery technology by the year 2030.
So let me back up for a second, give you some technical stuff here.
The battery uses Argyrodite, which, of course, the prefix means silver, but Argyrodite, not sure how to pronounce it, a sulfide solid electrolyte, you know, chemistry, chemistry, chemistry, solving issues of lithium dendrite growth.
Okay, good.
But Samsung says they estimate that after wrapping up production in 2027, that just their own production will need 500 metric tons.
Is that MT is that metric tons of refined silver per year?
500 metric tons doesn't let me do the math again.
Jeez.
Because I don't think it couldn't be 500 million tons.
There's no way.
It's got to be metric tons.
So 500 metric tons is 16 million Troy ounces, according to AI.
Got it?
Okay.
I know there's a lot of math in today's episode here.
Math and chemistry.
It's like gee town.
So Samsung is saying that by 2030, they estimate 16 million Troy ounces of silver that they will need.
And remember, the La Parilla mine, what was that going to produce?
Maybe up to 100,000 ounces of silver?
They need 16 million.
Oh, so better start shoveling.
You know, going to need some more mines.
And it takes years, like five to ten years, to open up a silver mine, by the way.
So that's not going to happen by 2030.
You know, realistically.
So good luck.
Anyway, I hope I'm doing all the math correctly here.
Double check all my numbers, if you would, please, especially before making any investment decisions, you know.
But with all these freaking conversions between ounces and tons and metric and back and forth, obviously it drives me freaking bonkers because as a lab scientist myself, you know, I do everything in the metric system where math makes sense.
And, you know, the imperial system drives me absolutely nuts.
Bottom line is my conclusion, but don't take this as investment advice.
My conclusion is silver demand is about to skyrocket, not just because of solar right now and the data centers, which will continue through 2026, but also because of this battery tech from Samsung coming online in 2027.
And if we see silver at $200 an ounce by the end of 2027, I would not be surprised.
And there are some experts who are saying numbers so high that they sound crazy.
So I'm not even going to mention them.
But let me assure you that $200 an ounce is kind of on the conservative side to what some people are saying.
You know, it's not going to go to infinity.
I mean, there's some price at which market forces balance this out or they just stop making the products that use it.
You know, there's some price where that's true.
I don't know what that price is.
I think it's way beyond $100.
It's probably beyond $200, but it's going to take a few years.
And then at that point, I don't know.
I don't know where it goes.
But if you have silver, you might want to consider holding on to it, not cashing it in right now.
But again, don't take this as investment advice.
If you don't have silver and you want to get some, I believe that we are early in this massive multi-year ramp up of demand.
I think we're early.
So I don't think we're in a silver bubble.
I was unsure a few weeks ago, but then I started doing a lot more research on the actual what's driving the demand.
And now I'm convinced that this has just begun.
In fact, for me personally, although I'm not in the silver acquisition mode right now, but if I were, I would just buy it where it is right now.
If you want to buy it, then definitely visit our gold and silver sponsor, which is Battalion Metals, co-founded by Tucker Carlson, and Chris Olson and his whole group, who I just interviewed recently.
You can get there by going to metalswithmike.com.
That's our affiliate link, metalswithmike.com.
If you use the code Ranger at checkout, they will waive the shipping insurance fee, which will save you a little bit, especially since silver is heavy.
Well, I guess the insurance doesn't care about the weight, but it's the shipping insurance fee, whatever that happens to be, that will be waived for you.
Final disclaimer, again, don't take this as investment advice.
Do your own research.
Check all my math.
You know, some of these numbers are estimates from some of the experts, like how much silver goes into every car.
Those are estimates.
Or how much silver is going to come out of this mine in Mexico?
That's an estimate, right?
So there's going to be some wiggle room in all of this.
So nobody knows for sure what's going to happen to silver pricing or silver scarcity.
But all the, from what I can tell, all the vectors are pointing in the direction of like shockingly high demand over the next five years, combined with scary short supply.
And that means prices are almost certain to skyrocket.
There could be bumps along the way.
There could be corrections.
Maybe in the short term, maybe silver dumps to $50.
Maybe.
I don't know.
If it does, I'm going to buy as much as I can at 50.
But I wouldn't even wait.
People who have waited have missed out on a lot of the rise in silver.
In fact, where is it right now?
Yeah, it's $69 in change right now as I'm looking at it.
And by the way, gold is over $4,400.
It's just about to hit $4,500.
But gold doesn't have this new use in the batteries or in the solar panels, etc.
So gold's being driven by monetary phenomena, whereas silver is being driven by industrial phenomena.
And that's a really important distinction.
That's why I think it's good to own both in various formats, because sometimes there's a monetary crisis, like the collapse of the Western fiat currency system, which is probably coming.
And then other times there's a crazy high demand for silver for industrial use, which is what we've been talking about here today.
So it's good to have your foot in each of those so that you can take advantage of those price increases or value increases as they take place.
JP Morgan is long on millions of ounces on silver.
They actually have physical silver now.
They are stockpiling.
They're no longer short.
They're not shorting silver.
And China's buying silver like crazy.
And China is reportedly going to be blocking exports of silver at the end of this month, which is only a few days away.
So all of this adds up to crazy high silver prices, probably, unless there's something that I've missed between now and the year 2030.
So get ready for that.
And thank you for listening.
Oh, by the way, if you want to read about silver, we've got a lot of books on silver at the book creation engine website that I've built using AI.
And that website's called brightlearn.ai.
It's got a great search function.
You can just search for the word silver and it'll bring up all the books on silver for you right there.
And those books are written with our AI engine that's been trained on all my interviews with Andy Sheckman and David Morgan and Steve Quayle and a bunch of other people, John Rubino and many others who are experts.
And Chris Olson, you know, a lot of gold and silver experts that I've interviewed over the years.
And that's all, you know, that's all folded into the engine that writes those books.
So if you download those books, they're all free from books.brightlearn.ai, you're going to discover that the books are really well informed in terms of silver and central banking.
And, you know, I interviewed Ron Paul too, and that's part of it.
I interviewed all these people.
I mean, you know, I've done thousands of interviews over the years, and every single interview about gold and silver will impact the book that's created at brightlearn.ai because that's how it works.
So punch in the keyword silver.
It'll bring up a bunch of books and then you can click on those books and you can download them for free.
So take advantage of that.
Again, it's at books.brightlearn.ai.
And if you want to get physical gold and silver, the website for our affiliate intro is metalswithmike.com.
So thank you for your interest.
Thank you for your support.
And keep stacking silver because this is going to get very interesting.
All right.
Take care.
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