Panasonic plans additional $4 billion U.S. EV battery plant

Panasonic is in talks to build an additional $4 billion electric vehicle battery plant in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Panasonic, a supplier to EV giant Tesla for more than a decade, is looking at Oklahoma as the location for its new plant, the newspaper said citing people familiar with the matter.

In July, the Japanese conglomerate selected Kansas over Oklahoma to build a new battery plant that would create up to 4,000 jobs with investment of up to $4 billion.

Then, Panasonic said the site was chosen based on factors including its proximity to Texas and favorable tax treatment.

Now the company ended up going with Kansas for a large-scale battery cell factory, its second in the US. The Japanese manufacturer is actually considering building the two plants simultaneously.

“We are examining various growth strategies for our automotive battery business, but there is no further information that we can share at the moment aside from what we have already announced,” a Panasonic spokesperson said.

The EV industry is increasingly using raw materials such as lithium and cobalt to meet a surge in demand. Panasonic aims to triple or quadruple EV battery production capacity by fiscal 2028 from the current level of roughly 50 gigawatt-hours per year.