【SMM Analysis】Tesla signed a contract with CATL to expand its battery factory in the United States

SMM News on February 2nd: Originally published by the Ye YUAN, reposted by Florence HU.

According to market sources, Tesla, a leading global company in new energy vehicles and energy storage, is planning to purchase production equipment from CATL (Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited) to expand its battery factory in Sparks, Nevada, USA. It is worth noting that Tesla will purchase equipment from CATL, and will bear all the costs of operating and purchasing activities of the entire factory. CATL's employees will only provide technical support such as equipment and production line installation and debugging, and will not be heavily involved in the overall operation of the factory.

According to an insider, the main target battery type for Tesla's battery factory expansion is lithium iron phosphate batteries. The main purpose is to increase the production of Megapack, a large-scale commercial energy storage battery, in the energy storage field. It is understood that Megapack is one of Tesla's battery products for utilities. Each Megapack unit can store about 4 MWh of energy, which can meet the one-hour electricity demand of 3,600 households. In addition, in terms of design, Megapack supports plug-and-play, making it easy to combine and form a large-scale and intelligent energy storage array that can be connected to the global grid system. In the past few years, Tesla has not only improved the deployment efficiency of Megapack by 4 times, but also successfully reduced the labor required for installing these systems to one-third of the original.

It is worth noting that this is not the first time CATL has participated in the expansion of a battery factory in the United States. On February 14, 2023, the well-known American automaker Ford announced a $3.5 billion investment to jointly build a power battery factory in Michigan with CATL. According to the plan at that time, the factory is scheduled to start production in 2026 with a capacity of 35 GWh, which is enough to provide power batteries for 400,000 electric vehicles annually, creating approximately 2,500 jobs. Ford has full ownership and operation rights of the factory, while CATL only provides support in terms of battery patent technology licensing.

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