Nextracker, the U.S. solar manufacturer, has acquired steel solar panel frames producer Origami Solar in a $53 million all-cash transaction, the companies announced this week.
The acquisition marks an expansion into the solar panel frame market for Nextracker, which was founded in 2012 and has focused mostly on solar trackers and related electronics for utility-scale solar projects until now. And it’s a further investment in the company’s domestic supply chain, which it has been working to secure since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Origami builds solar panel frames using U.S.-made recycled steel rather than the aluminum that most of the industry relies upon — most of which comes from China, which controls 60% of the world’s smelters.
Gregg Patterson, CEO of the company, which he co-founded in 2019 with a group of fellow solar veterans, said in a 2024 Latitude Media Frontier Forum that aluminum frames are “an Achilles heel for solar,” and that substituting them is key to securing a domestic supply chain for solar.
“The evolution of the world around us has created such a significant risk to imported aluminum frames,” he said at the time, referring to geopolitical and trade tensions that had pushed aluminum prices to historic highs. Things have only gotten worse since then.
Most recently, the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” introduced new “foreign entity of concern” rules, which place further restrictions on solar panels containing materials coming from countries such as China, North Korea, and Iran.
Origami’s U.S.-based fabrication capacity appears to have played an important role in its acquisition by Nextracker. In the press release announcing the deal, Nextracker CEO Dan Shugar notes that using steel for solar panel frames not only offers “greater strength at a competitive cost,” but, “most importantly, it helps to unlock opportunities for localized manufacturing from steel coil through final fabrication.”
Nexttracker has been investing in reshoring its production ever since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the market’s supply chain, leading Shugar to come to the realization that the company had to build more U.S. manufacturing.
The move comes at an uncertain time for the U.S. solar industry, which is being rocked by the OBBB’s earlier-than-expected sunsetting of some supporting tax credits, as well as the new FEOC regulations.
A July 2025 analysis from Princeton’s REPEAT Project estimates that the OBBB could reduce solar’s expected growth by almost 30 gigawatts by 2030, and 140 GW by 2035. According to recent data by the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project of the Rhodium Group and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, investment in clean manufacturing is already slowing down, with investment in solar manufacturing in the second quarter of 2025 down 25% compared to the same period last year.
As Nextracker’s announcement illustrates, the shifting regulations are still incentivizing some solar companies to invest in domestic manufacturing — especially given that the 45X advanced manufacturing tax credit survived for most products until 2033. Last month, solar manufacturer Tigo Energy also announced an expansion of its domestic supply chain through a partnership with EG4 Electronics to produce optimized inverters in the U.S.
