What

Gigafactories, a term coined by Tesla are factories with a yearly production of batteries over 1 GWh (roughly 15000 battery packs)

Typically nowadays they are built with a goal of around 40GWh except Tesla that is usually looking to expand that to 100GWh and even a mind boggling 250GWh per gigafactory. (Before Tesla the 2010 era factories were barely going over 2-3 GWh)

I’ve compiled a list of most of the existing and planned GigaFactories and started doing some analysis, there’s about 60 of them and at least half are only in the planning stage, the target year for opening them being around 2026 or so.

The total number of cars produced in 2021 was 80 million, using the mid range estimate of 15k cars per GWh the current capacity is at (750GWh*15k) 10 million cars/year (out of which over 1 million is Tesla alone), projecting this forward to 2030 the numbers are (5kGWh*15k) a respectable 75 million cars/year (Tesla’s even loftier projections just for themselves is 20 million cars by 2030)

Who

The capacity seems to be almost evenly distributed between 6 major players which are often a car manufacturer joint venture with a materials company, in order of rank:

  1. Tesla : Panasonic

  2. Volkswagen : Northvolt

  3. Stellantis : Total, Mercedes

  4. SK Innovation : Ford

  5. LG Chem : GM

  6. Envision AESC = Nissan, NEC + Mercedes, Renault

That being said more than this is future plans over the next 5 years at least, currently Tesla is the only one with actual capacity up and running

Where

Things get quite complicated when we try to figure out where most of this capacity exist and where its being planned, on paper the most of it is planned in Europe with USA second and China third.

In reality we will see how that will pan out, Europe and USA is catching up fast and places like Canada are starting up but Asia still has the lead at the moment.

When

It is hard to estimate but out of 1500 GWh planned that i’m tracking by 2030 we only have maybe 250 GWh at the moment (Summer 2022)

According to Bank of Dallas the US alone is on track for 1500 GWh by 2031 while China is quickly closing up to that figure as we speak.

In Europe, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence's Lithium ion Battery Gigafactory Assessment (September 2018) quite ridiculously pegged Europe’s battery cell capacity to 120GWh by 2030, in reality the planned annual capacity figure stands at 789.2GWh in 2030 and even that is likely to double to at least match the American expansion.

All that will still pale in comparison to China’s estimated 5000 GWh by 2030, its going to be interesting to see if that actually turns our true or the other countries like Taiwan, South Korea will move in just like they did with chipmaking industries.

More

You can find my most up to date gigafactory data in the evmetrics app, as well as the list of factories you can see them on a map and with realtime graphs.