GM will invest $625 million to support a joint venture with Canadian mining company Lithium Americas and the Thacker Pass mining project in Nevada. The $625 million investment includes $430 million in cash funding to support the construction of Phase 1, as well as a $195 million letter of credit facility. The new project will help support new electric vehicle production and a U.S.-based EV supply chain.
According to a report from Reuters, GM will acquire a 38-percent asset-level ownership stake in the new Thacker Pass mine. Construction at the site began in March of 2023 following a Lithium Americas court win against Indigenous communities, conservationists, and ranchers. The Thacker Pass mine is located in Humboldt County, south of the Nevada-Oregon border, and contains enough raw materials to support electric vehicle battery production for upwards of 1 million EVs annually.
As GM Authority covered previously, General Motors previously delayed the second stage of its investment in the joint venture with Lithium Americas, originally set at $330 million. Earlier in 2024, Lithium Americas announced that the U.S. Department of Energy would lend it up to $2.26 billion to build the Thacker Pass mine, marking one of Washington’s biggest investments to date in the mining industry. The investment is in support of the Biden administration’s goal to reduce U.S. reliance on raw materials sourced from China and move the U.S. towards widespread EV adoption. Lithium Americas now states that it expects to close the DOE loan in the coming weeks and finalize the agreement by the end of the year.
For now, extraction at the Tracker Pass mine is slated to kick off in the second half of the 2026 calendar year. The new mine is expected to create 1,500 new jobs, including 1,000 construction jobs and 500 jobs in operations.
Early last year, Nevada Chief Judge Miranda Du ordered the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to investigate the impact of Lithium America’s plan to dump waste products on land near the mine.
Comment
Well, the American Indians got hammered on this one. I was not aware of the lawsuit, but I was aware that the Indians were not happy about the idea of a dirty mining project in the area. EVs rule I guess. The government tells farmers that they have to let fields lay fallow because they are “potential habitat” for a rat that no one has ever seen in the area. But we can lay waste to whatever for the sake of EVs. If the farmers could figure out how to raise a crop essential to the production of EVs they could plant wherever they wanted.