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Hyundai Motor Group’s Meta Plant near Savannah will include a $4.3 billion joint venture battery factory built in partnership with LG Energy Solution, which will own 50 percent of the facility designed to supply electrified Kia, Hyundai and Genesis models produced in the U.S.
The customer that precipitated the project is Hyundai’s so-called Meta Plant, its first dedicated EV factory in the U.S., which will host the joint venture plant on its 2,923-acre site in Bryan County.
The battery facility was included in Hyundai’s original $5.54 billion investment that broke ground in October, promising 8,100 jobs including affiliated suppliers, which are investing at a faster clip than anticipated as Hyundai races to build vehicles in the U.S. Some $2 billion in supplier projects have already been announced, more than doubling the expected investment,
The newly announced joint venture is part of the original incentives deal negotiated with Hyundai, according to the Georgia Department of Economic Development.
The partnership between Hyundai and LG Energy, signed May 26 by the companies’ CEOs in Seoul, reveals the identity of Hyundai’s joint venture partner and the spending that will be dedicated to battery cells.
“We are a year further down the road, and the companies are sharpening their pencils on jobs, investment, and long term projections based on real, on-the-ground numbers and more accurate market projections,” Commissioner Pat Wilson said in a statement provided to Global Atlanta.
While planned earlier, the details of the Bryan County battery plant emerged after Hyundai last year announced a separate joint venture factory in Bartow County with SK On. That facility will cost at least $5 billion and create 3,500 jobs.
The details also came after the Treasury Department in March provided more guidance on the implementation of EV battery incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act, the $369 billion climate bill that was signed into law last August.
The joint venture plant will produce 30 gigawatt hours of cell capacity, enough to power about 300,000 vehicles a year — in line with production targets for the first phase of the Meta Plant.
Hyundai Mobis, another supplier with an expanding Georgia presence, is set to package the cells into modules. Mobis in November became the second supplier to announce a facility to serve the Meta Plant, committing $926 million toward a factory that employ 1,500 people and produce 450,000 electric powertrains per year at full capacity.
Construction on the battery plant is expected to begin in the second half of 2023; it will be operational by the end of 2025 at the earliest.
The deal shows how Korean firms continue to invest in the future of electric mobility in Georgia and across the United States.
The plant is LG’s seventh announced facility in the U.S., where the federal government has set an ambitious goal of seeing half of all vehicle sales go to electrified units by 2030. SK On, which was the battery pioneer in Georgia with its $2.6 billion factory in Commerce, also has joint ventures in Kentucky and Tennessee with Ford.
Hyundai sister company Kia Motors is planning to build the all-electric EV9 for 2024 at its plant in West Point.
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