THE symbolism was clear last June when Emmanuel Macron, surrounded by factory workers, held up a sleek lithium battery in his right hand and a mining lamp in his left. He was in Douai, a northern French city with a coal mining history dating back to the 1700s. The city is now also the site of a battery factory, which would allow France to produce all parts of electric vehicles domestically. This factory, Macron declared, represented an “economic and ecological revolution.”
Macron immediately acknowledged that France didn’t pull this off alone: “We brought in investors from the other side of the world. They transferred their technologies. They helped train people,” Macron said, gesturing at a man beside him.
The man was Zhang Lei, the founder of Envision, a prominent Chinese company that makes wind turbines and lithium batteries. Its battery arm is investing up to €2 billion in this Douai factory and, more importantly, contributed the expertise for efficient mass production. He and Macron grabbed markers and signed their names on the first battery produced in Douai. “Thank you, Chairman, because you trusted us and because you did exactly what you said you would do,” Macron said, looking straight into Zhang’s eyes.
In 2026, it’s OK to nerd out at parties about batteries. Lithium batteries are turning solar and wind into 24/7 stable energy sources. Battery-powered cars are shaking up the multitrillion-dollar automotive industry and made Elon Musk the richest man on Earth. Lithium batteries even won a Nobel Prize, and the US government now categorizes lithium as a “critical mineral.”
Lithium’s rising tides lifted one set of boats more than others—China’s battalion of battery companies. After decades of quiet growth, firms such as CATL, BYD, Gotion High-Tech, and Envision are now primary suppliers for the world’s EVs and energy grids. In 2024, more than 80 percent of the world’s battery cells were produced in China, according to the International Energy Agency. Now those companies are expanding beyond China’s borders. In the past decade they’ve built or announced at least 68 factories outside China, according to data collected by WIRED and the Rhodium Group, a New York–based think tank.
Collectively, per the Rhodium Group, the factories represent an investment of more than $45 billion in the rest of the world. They also reflect a big shift in what manufacturing dominance looks like. “Made in China” used to be—and still often is—a label for cheap labor, knockoffs, and $5 gadgets. Now it also means state-of-the-art technology assembled anywhere in the world.
“We believe it’s a new phase. We have never really seen that in Chinese overseas investments,” says Armand Meyer, a senior research analyst at Rhodium Group. According to his calculations, 2024 was the first year Chinese EV and battery companies spent more money building factories outside of China than within. “They are ready to leave the domestic market, and they are as competitive as traditional Western players, or even more competitive,” Meyer continues. “We think it’s just the beginning.”
Today, some of the world’s best battery research comes from Chinese universities and companies, says Brian Engle, chairman of NAATBatt International, a US trade association for the battery industry. And that’s because China bet on it early.
When Engle toured a lab at China’s top engineering school in 2019, he saw more than 60 graduate students building and testing battery cells. Surprised, he turned to an American academic on the tour and asked her how many American universities they’d have to lump together to find as many battery-focused postgrads. “And she said we couldn’t,” he recalled. “We simply couldn’t.”
So it’s perhaps no surprise that Chinese battery companies are dominant—and that the competition between them is fierce. Nowadays, local incentives and lower shipping costs make it such that opening a factory overseas can be more profitable than staying home. CATL, the world’s largest lithium battery maker, reported in a recent financial filing that its profit margin is 29 percent overseas versus nearly 23 percent in China. Other Chinese companies, including Gotion and EVE Energy, also have reported higher profit margins overseas.
Macron isn’t the only politician to herald a Chinese battery plant’s arrival. The lovefest is virtually global: Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva rode in a BYD vehicle with the company’s founder. Spain’s prime minister held hands with CATL’s CEO. The governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, shared a stage with Gotion’s chairman to announce a factory in Manteno, Illinois.
But problems emerge as blueprints turn into massive plants. Factory projects often include promises to hire locally, but sometimes companies bring in migrant labor. In Hungary, local media reported in July that CATL laid off more than 100 employees at a factory, most of them Hungarians, prompting the municipality to launch an investigation and raid the plant. CATL is also facing protests and a lawsuit in Hungary for its water use and environmental footprint—issues commonly faced by battery factories worldwide.
The situation might sound oddly familiar. When Apple built its technology empire on the backs of Chinese factories, the country had to reckon with whether it was benefiting from Apple’s victories or being exploited. As China’s battery technology takes over the world, Chinese companies are the ones now raising these questions—of who ultimately benefits and who is exploiting whom.
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