- Panasonic opened its second battery plant in the U.S. on Monday. It's located in De Soto, Kansas.
- Tesla is Panasonic's largest customer, and local production will help protect the batteries from tariffs and global trade tensions.
- The 2170 cylindrical cells made in De Soto will have more energy capacity, the company claims.
This story has been updated with new information since its publication.
Tesla battery supplier Panasonic Energy on Monday inaugurated what it claims will be the world’s largest electric vehicle battery manufacturing facility when fully complete. Located just outside Kansas City in De Soto, Kansas, the 4.7-million-square-foot plant is roughly the size of 225 football fields and marks a major expansion of Panasonic’s U.S. manufacturing footprint.
It’s the company’s second battery facility in the U.S., following the Sparks, Nevada, plant it operates within the Tesla Gigafactory campus. While the Nevada site has been producing cells since 2017, the new $4 billion De Soto plant will boost Panasonic’s total U.S. battery production capacity to 73 gigawatt-hours once fully operational.
Gallery: Panasonic Battery Plant Kansas
Panasonic says the Kansas facility will be 20% more productive than its Nevada plant. It will manufacture 2170 cylindrical cells with 5% more energy capacity. When fully operational, the plant will be able to churn out 70 cells per second—more than six million per day.
While Panasonic touts the De Soto facility as the world’s largest of its kind, that distinction likely refers to its physical size. In terms of battery production capacity, competitors like LG Energy Solution, BYD and CATL operate far larger factories or have significantly higher combined output across multiple sites.
The plant comes at a critical moment for EVs in the U.S. Trade tensions with China and generous subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act have triggered a wave of domestic battery investment, much of it concentrated in Republican states and districts. The result is thousands of new jobs and a battery manufacturing boom unlike ever before.
But while EV sales soared in recent years, growth has slowed and become uneven over the past few quarters, especially after the Trump administration took office. Some automakers are thriving, but Tesla is losing ground. If EV growth continues to slow down, there’s also an increasing risk of battery manufacturing overcapacity, an issue already plaguing China’s battery industry.
Panasonic’s biggest customer, Tesla, has seen global sales decline due to an aging lineup, Elon Musk’s political antics and a pivot toward AI and robotics. According to local Japanese media reports, Panasonic initially planned to maximize production at the new Kansas plant by March 2027. Those plans are now delayed. A proposed third U.S. battery plant has also been put on hold amid weaker demand for Teslas and reduced federal support for EVs.
Update: Bloomberg reported on Monday that Panasonic will aim for full production output this year. “We’re not feeling the slowdown yet and we’re very bullish,” Megan Myungwon Lee, Panasonic's head of operations in North America, told the outlet.
Still, the De Soto factory should help future-proof America’s EV industry and will also help Panasonic diversify its customer base.
The company already supplies batteries to the EV startup Lucid and has also entered agreements with Mazda. The plant is also the largest economic development project in Kansas history; it will add 4,000 direct high-paying manufacturing jobs and a total of 8,000 jobs from suppliers and related industries. That’s in addition to 4,000 workers Panasonic already employs in Nevada.
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