The battery industry has long chased the gigafactory model. Yet, many of the most successful technological innovations and industries have hit their stride by using a decidedly different one: outsource production to proven manufacturers.
The semiconductor industry in particular has embraced the foundry model, which has companies specialize in either design (also known as a “fabless” approach) or manufacturing and outsource the other element. It enables companies and manufacturers to develop more specialized expertise and reduce overall costs.
For Unigrid’s CEO, Darren Tan, following in their footsteps was the only logical path to getting the company’s sodium-ion batteries off the ground and scaling rapidly.
“We’re one of the few battery teams that use a 100% foundry approach and contract manufacturing,” he told ESS News. In the company’s early days, Tan learned that 1.3 terawatts worth of gigafactories were announced in 2021, yet only a tiny fraction of them came to fruition; most were cancelled or delayed. He didn’t want a Unigrid production plant to be among them. So, Tan explained, “we looked at tech companies in parallel industries and found that many of them had strong product designs and outsourced the manufacturing to someone else.”
To read the full story, please visit our ESS News website.
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