The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI), the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), and the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute are racing to close the gap between what America invents and what it can build at scale. 

When a key semiconductor plant in Japan went offline after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, supply chain disruptions quickly spread far beyond the disaster zone, affecting manufacturers around the world. 

Nearly all of the natural graphite the United States uses, and 70% to 80% of its rare earth elements, come from a supply chain the U.S. doesn't control.  

Different vulnerabilities, same underlying problem: The U.S. invents faster than almost any country on Earth, but it doesn't always build, or secure the materials to build, fast enough, reliably enough, or close enough to home to matter when it counts.  

That gap has become a national security problem, and Georgia Tech is tackling it within its own centers and with a wider network of universities, government agencies, and industry partners. 

“You want to make sure you don't have a brittle supply chain,” says Tom Kurfess, executive director of GTMI and the former chief manufacturing officer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “One link breaks, and all of a sudden, you can't move forward.” For Kurfess, resiliency requires manufacturing networks that are digitally connected, built around qualified processes, and capable of shifting work across facilities without sacrificing quality, traceability, or performance. 

A Brittle Supply Chain Is a National Security Risk 

That single point of failure is the kind of fragility Kurfess worked to design out of American manufacturing during earlier stints at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, at Oak Ridge and now at GTMI. Concentrate too much capacity in one plant or supplier, he says, and a single disruption — a natural disaster, a fire, or a cyberattack — can freeze an entire industry. His fix is resiliency built through distributed, digitally connected manufacturing. As an example, Kurfess points to the opportunities created by the transition to electric vehicles, where production can be distributed across multiple motor manufacturing facilities located closer to assembly operations. With common designs, digital connectivity, and qualified processes, production can be redistributed more readily when disruptions occur. 

GTMI applies the same logic to defense and energy supply chains, helping small manufacturers that build subassemblies for prime contractors connect to qualified digital manufacturing networks where production status, part traceability, and available capacity can be monitored in real time. Kurfess describes their role as “the Google Maps for manufacturing” — spotting the traffic jam and rerouting around it before a bottleneck stalls production.  

The Raw-Material Chokepoint 

Yuanzhi Tang, executive director of Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute and founding director of its Center for Critical Mineral Solutions, has studied these supply chain vulnerabilities for years. Her focus on critical minerals and materials such as rare earths and gallium is only part of the picture, she says; battery materials carry similar risks. The U.S. relies heavily on imports for these important raw materials, with 70% to 80% for rare earths, nearly 100% for natural graphite, and 20% to 60% of the lithium, cobalt, and nickel used in batteries. “Critical minerals and materials are like vitamins,” she says. “Most of them we don't need in large quantities, but you can't replace them without compromising the performance.” 

Tang is leading a Georgia Tech effort, backed by a $7.5 million Department of Energy (DOE) grant, to map critical mineral resources across the Atlantic coastal plain, from Puerto Rico to Maine, with Georgia and the Southeast as an unusually rich source. Her deep expertise in geochemistry and rare earth materials is reflected in more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and her role as co-editor-in-chief of the journal Chemical Geology. Georgia is the country's top kaolin clay producer, she notes, and rare earth-bearing waste from that mining could potentially supply materials the country currently imports. 

Much of that work depends on physical space to test and scale new processes: GTMI's Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF) serves as a shared facility where researchers from different disciplines can develop and scale manufacturing processes without building dedicated infrastructure for every technology. Tang's team hopes to co-locate a critical-mineral supply chain demonstration capability there, along with a Georgia Tech Advanced Battery Center pilot that SEI is standing up in the same space. 

What makes the region distinctive isn't just geology. It's the chance to connect resource extraction, processing, manufacturing, and recycling within a few hours' drive, which Tang says is unique and hard to match. She compares the challenge of building critical mineral supply chains to building an airplane. “You can build a wing of the plane, you can build a wheel of the plane, but if you don't coordinate them, you can never build a full plane.”  

Georgia Tech is coordinating the Resource Intelligence and Innovation Alliance with universities, national labs, and industry partners. Domestic mineral projects typically take close to three decades to move from discovery to market, Tang says. A coordinated regional supply chain, she believes, could bring the speed to market and significantly cut that time to years. 

Designing Supply Chains for Scale, Not Just Invention 

Turning a prototype into a fielded system also requires designing the manufacturing network itself, and that's where Chris Gaffney, managing director of Georgia Tech's Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, brings a different lens. Gaffney spent 25 years in supply chain leadership at The Coca-Cola Company, including as president of the group responsible for 95% of its North American volume, before joining Georgia Tech. 

“The question of scale is a riddle in any supply chain,” Gaffney says. “People who get it right, they win.” He argues that, too often, companies optimize their own operations while overlooking their suppliers' suppliers, and that a real scale-up strategy extends responsibility across the entire chain, from raw material to end user. 

Gaffney draws that lesson from his own experience at Coca-Cola. The company once assumed a can line running smoothly at one bottling plant would perform the same way in a second plant, using the same equipment and cans from the same supplier. It didn't; the tolerances and fits had to be revalidated at the second facility before the line would run reliably. “You can't make assumptions about those variables,” he says. 

Gaffney's central design principle is to bring manufacturing partners into the technology design process as early as possible, rather than handing them a finished blueprint. Using a drone as an example, he describes designers, manufacturers, and end users working together from the start. “You go from the tabletop where you make one, to the line where you want to make a thousand, but then you have to make sure that when somebody's in a dirty, grimy combat environment, the thing is still going to work.”  

He notes that while assembly can spread across smaller, harder-to-target sites — similar to how Ukrainian drone manufacturers dispersed production into basements to survive attacks — the most sensitive components still require concentrated, tightly controlled manufacturing. In his view, deciding where to centralize or distribute production is a core design choice with direct national security consequences. 

Kurfess argues that timing is equally important. Manufacturers must preserve the ability to scale rapidly without carrying every tool and component in their inventory. They can preserve qualified digital designs, process plans, and tooling data so production can be restarted, redirected or expanded when needed. 

Georgia's Regional Advantage 

All three Georgia Tech experts point to the Southeast, and Georgia in particular, as one region well positioned to pull these pieces together, though careful to frame it as an example rather than the only answer. Gaffney credits the state's port access, calling it “the most progressive port in the U.S.,” along with its rail, road infrastructure, and growing technical talent. Similar pushes are underway elsewhere, he notes, from nuclear manufacturing partnerships with Oak Ridge to critical mineral and battery projects in other states. “Every region has its advantages. That’s the beauty of the country,” he said. 

What distinguishes Georgia is how many of those advantages sit within a few hours of each other. 

A Convener for the Next Decade 

None of Georgia Tech’s experts argue the U.S. can, or should, build every critical supply chain onshore. Instead, they describe coordinated regional resiliency as sourcing more materials closer to home and designing manufacturing networks that can continue operating even when individual facilities, suppliers, or transportation nodes are disrupted. 

Gaffney sees Georgia Tech’s role as setting an example other regions can follow. “We role model what good looks like and what good could be,” he said. “Being a convener, bringing different entities together to solve a problem, that's the kind of example I think we have an obligation to present.” 

In Kurfess’ view, manufacturers increasingly need to think of capacity not as a single factory, but as a digitally connected network of qualified suppliers, manufacturing processes, and production assets that can respond rapidly when conditions change. 

GTMI, SEI, and the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute are interconnected responses to the same national problem: that invention without a path to scale isn't security. Georgia’s combination of accessible raw materials, port infrastructure, a manufacturing base, and research depth allows Georgia Tech to demonstrate what a coordinated, regional approach within a national network can look like. 

By Anne Wainscott-Sargent