Forge Nano Morrisville Battery Manufacturing Expansion

Forge Nano breaks ground on August 19 on an expansion of its Morrisville battery plant that adds a second floor and roughly 3 gigawatt-hours of annual cell capacity. That’s about 150 million cells a year on top of what the original 210,000-square-foot building was built to produce.

The original plant was a $165 million commitment announced in 2023, with more than 200 jobs attached. The expansion is backed by up to $100 million in non-dilutive funding from the Department of Energy.

Project Scope

Adding a floor to an operating manufacturing building is a different problem than building one. Battery cell production runs in dry rooms with tight humidity and particulate control, and vertical expansion means structural work above live process space. Sequencing has to protect the environmental envelope on the floor below, which usually pushes heavy structural steel into planned shutdowns rather than continuous work.

Creative Manufacturing Properties developed the building, its first project in North Carolina. Samsung SDI is a strategic partner, putting in capital along with technical and manufacturing support. That matters, because cell manufacturing yield is a process problem more than an equipment problem, and Samsung SDI has decades of it.

The general contractor and architect for the expansion haven’t been named publicly.

Why It Matters

North Carolina’s battery cluster has mostly been about very large greenfield plants. Forge Nano is the other model: a materials company that built a small plant, proved a process, and is now expanding inside its own footprint on federal money.

For contractors, that second model produces steadier work than the megaproject cycle does. Greenfield gigafactories hire thousands, then release them. Incremental capacity adds keep a smaller crew busy across years, and they demand a builder who can work around production rather than on an empty site.

The DOE funding is also a signal about where federal battery money is going after the first round of headline awards: toward capacity that already exists and can be scaled, not just new announcements.

Project Team & Details