Hyundai and LG to spend an extra $2B on their US EV battery plant

Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution (LGES) are going to inject an additional $2 billion into their $4.3 billion US EV battery factory.

Carmaker Hyundai and lithium-ion battery maker LGES signed a memorandum of understanding at LGES’s headquarters in Seoul in May. The two companies will 50/50 open their EV battery plant in Bryan County, Georgia, south of Savannah. It will be adjacent to Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, currently under construction.

The annual production capacity of Hyundai and LG’s new battery plant will be 30 GWh, and it will be able to support the production of 300,000 EVs annually.

Hyundai Mobis will assemble battery packs using cells from the battery factory, then supply them to the Hyundai Motor Group’s US EV factory, where it will produce Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis EV models.

The EV factory and the battery factory together represent more than $7.5 billion in investment in Georgia with this new $2 billion injection. This boosts the number of new jobs to be created to 8,500 over the next eight years.

The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) offers a $7,500 tax credit for EVs that meet domestic manufacturing requirements, including batteries, as well as incentives for companies to build manufacturing hubs for EVs, batteries, and clean energy.

Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis EV models currently don’t qualify if purchased because they don’t meet those domestic manufacturing requirements, so Hyundai and LGES decided to make this huge joint industrial investment in the US. 

Battery production is expected to start at the end of 2025, at the earliest. 

Read more: How US EV investments have rocketed in a year – in numbers

Photo: Hyundai

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