Yoko Kubota and Christopher Otts
NINGDE, China -- Inside a headquarters shaped like a giant battery cell, the billionaire who runs the world's largest battery company is confident the Americans will eventually come calling.
Washington has spent the past few years ghosting Robin Zeng, China's fourth-richest man. To the U.S. government, Chinese battery maker CATL is a geopolitical threat to be warded off with tariffs and national-security curbs.
Yet CATL has grown to become the world's largest electric-vehicle battery manufacturer thanks to its technology and low costs. It posted record profit of more than $10 billion last year, and an estimated one in three EVs sold around the world carries its batteries.
That is even without the U.S. market, where electric adoption lags behind that in China and Europe and where CATL's presence is limited. Zeng sees that as temporary. The EV market in the U.S. will remain small "for several years. But after that, it'll have to be booming, because it is the trend. It is the future," said Zeng, who turned 58 on Friday, in an interview. And building that future without CATL, he said, "is difficult and the cost [is] too high."
There is evidence for that even in America's EV winter.
Ford recently ditched South Korea's SK Group as its joint-venture partner for battery projects, focusing instead on its plan to build CATL-designed batteries at a $3 billion factory in Michigan. Ford is paying to license the Chinese company's intellectual property, a workaround the U.S. allows while it puts up legal and political barriers to prevent CATL from building its own plants.
General Motors is set to import China-made batteries from CATL and put them in its new Chevrolet Bolt -- also legal, albeit only by swallowing a 60% tariff. GM is selling the Bolt for only one model year while it makes longer-term plans. Meanwhile, the two U.S. battery plants GM spent billions of dollars to build are idle, unable to make the cheaper batteries that the automaker needs for the $30,000 vehicle.
And Tesla is using CATL technology for a battery plant in Nevada producing energy-storage systems, a business that is growing strongly while Tesla's core EV business has stalled.
Critics of China argue that embedding a Chinese battery maker in the U.S. supply chain would make the U.S. even more vulnerable to Beijing's economic coercion and undercut the chances of American battery companies catching up. Many are skeptical that America will welcome a full-fledged presence for Zeng and CATL anytime soon. The battery maker last year was placed on a Pentagon list of companies working with China's military -- a description CATL calls erroneous.
"It will be politically 'a bridge too far' in the short term for the U.S. administration to do a 180-degree pivot on any policies that result in liberalizing U.S. investment from Chinese companies, especially in sensitive industries," said William Zarit, a senior counselor at business-consulting firm Cohen Group and former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.
Proponents of cooperation with CATL say the company holds the key to cheaper batteries and affordable EVs. Otherwise, they say, the U.S. may never catch up to China.
Zeng's big bet
A technology bet by Zeng drove the company's growth.
Other companies invested tens of billions of dollars in building plants in the U.S. to make lithium-ion batteries with expensive nickel and cobalt inside. CATL, formally known as Contemporary Amperex Technology, wagered on batteries that use cheaper iron instead. The technology proved to offer nearly equal performance for less money.
At the Jiaocheng production base near Zeng's office, the company runs 12 battery-cell production lines. It is a business built for today's China, where factory workers are scarce.
Sheets of copper and aluminum go through machines that coat electrode slurry. Big winding machines then roll up the coated sheets, followed by a 20-ton pressing machine that squeezes them tightly. Robot arms weld the battery cell components. Every once in a while, workers dressed in white with hats and masks inspect the process, alongside artificial-intelligence technology used for quality control.
The company employs more than 21,000 engineers and has built expertise in electrochemistry that Zeng said doesn't exist in the U.S.
"U.S. people all go to chips, software, AI" because "they get a lot of money," he said. Batteries are considered "a very stupid industry in the U.S.," he added.
Founded just 15 years ago, CATL benefited from a Beijing policy in the second half of the 2010s that gave Chinese EV makers subsidies if they used batteries from approved supplies such as CATL. It also received government money directly -- more than $500 million in the first half of 2024 alone, according to CATL filings. Only state-owned petrochemical company Sinopec got more among mainland-China-listed companies, according to data provider Wind.
Technology lead
The iron-based battery chemistry, called lithium ferrophosphate, or LFP, costs up to 30% less a kilowatt-hour compared with nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries, the type South Korean and Japanese companies usually produce, industry experts say. Last year, CATL developed an LFP battery with 500 miles of driving range that can be powered for up to 320 miles in just five minutes.
CATL's technology is the reason Ford chose it for the Michigan factory tie-up, said Lisa Drake, a Ford executive on the project. "It probably would've taken us a decade to catch up and have LFP technology on our own," Drake said last year.
She lamented that LFP batteries were invented in the U.S., but Chinese firms such as CATL figured out how to make them viable in cars. "We just didn't commercialize that technology," she said.
When Ford shut down EV-battery production at a just-built factory in Kentucky recently, it again turned to CATL. Ford now plans to make utility-scale stationary batteries there, using CATL's technology.
Battery makers outside of China are racing to catch up. In recent days, LG Energy Solution, the battery unit of Korean electronics giant LG, said it would produce LFP batteries for Tesla's energy-storage business at a new factory in Michigan. LG and General Motors added that they are retrofitting a Tennessee EV battery plant to make LFP cells for grid-scale storage.
CATL is betting next on sodium-ion batteries, made from a sodium compound using table salt. Salt is much cheaper than lithium, and the battery also works better in very cold weather, although it packs less energy into a given volume. Chinese carmaker Changan is set to start selling an EV with CATL's sodium-ion battery in the middle of 2026.
While Ford and GM have needed CATL's battery technology, both automakers are also working on a new type of battery that would free them of dependence on the Chinese giant. "If we just do LFP like the Chinese are gonna do, we're not going to win," Kurt Kelty, GM's battery chief, said at a conference in October. "We need innovation."
Meeting Xi
At home, Zeng is a national tech hero, and was last year invited to meet leader Xi Jinping. This month, he was in Beijing attending China's biggest annual political event as an advisory body member. "We will sell our Chinese products globally and at the same time, we will promote our technology and standards worldwide," he told reporters at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
For Zeng, it's not just about serving lower-end, affordable EVs but also the cutting-edge tech CATL can offer for higher-end cars. Americans need CATL, Zeng said, because it can supply the latest technology while keeping costs down. "For the high-end products, it's very difficult without CATL," he said.
Zeng observed that robotaxis, potentially the industry's next big thing, are almost always EVs. If Americans abandon EVs, he said, "then you would be left behind for autonomous driving."
For now, Zeng says he can't build his own factory in the U.S. "I'm willing to invest there, but the problem is in some of the states, a Chinese company cannot even buy land," he said, alluding to restrictions in Texas and elsewhere.
Still, he looked ahead to a spring thaw.
"Maybe by the year 2028 it will change because business relationships are always stronger and longer-lasting than politicians," he said.
Write to Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com and Christopher Otts at christopher.otts@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 23, 2026 22:00 ET (02:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
