Nowhere else is the battery industry growing as quickly as in Hungary – and with investment from China. Politicians warn against Orbán's temptation, but the biggest investment in Hungarian history will soon take place in that country.
On 221 hectares, an area equivalent to 310 football fields, cranes reach and excavators dig deep. Amid fertile loess fields southwest of Debrecen in eastern Hungary, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) is building a battery factory with a planned capacity of 100 GWh per year. The Chinese battery manufacturer is investing 7.3 billion euros in this, the largest single investment in the country's history. Debrecen is CATL's second location outside China, after Erfurt, with a capacity of 14 GWh.
Viktor Orbán's strategy of “opening to the East” announced in 2010 is bearing fruit. In no other country is the battery industry growing as quickly as in Hungary. The boom began in 2018 with Samsung SDI in Göd, north of Budapest. The South Korean company converted its plasma screen factory into a battery factory. Other battery manufacturers followed, such as SK On, also from South Korea, in Komárom, on the border with Slovakia, and in Iváncsa, near Budapest. Korean company Ecopro BM is investing 700 million euros in Debrecen for a cathode factory. This year, Chinese battery companies Sunwoda and Eve Energy announced that they would locate their European base in Hungary. And Chinese car manufacturer BYD also announced just before Christmas that it would build its first European factory in Szeged. However, the biggest project by far is the CATL gigafactory, which could catapult Hungary into the top three battery manufacturers in the world.