California battery startup Lyten is purchasing a second abandoned Northvolt manufacturing facility, this time in Europe.
Lyten, which makes lithium-sulfur batteries, is actively pursuing a brownfield expansion strategy that it hopes will allow it to scale manufacturing while avoiding the financial woes plaguing many of its peers. Last year, after Northvolt shut down its lithium-metal subsidiary Cuberg, Lyten swooped in to purchase the assets and convert Cuberg’s Bay Area production facility over to lithium-sulfur. It was the first commercial-scale test of the company’s scavenger-like approach to growth.
Now Lyten will apply its strategy to a 270,000 square foot factory in Poland, which was Northvolt’s second major production site in Europe, and is currently the largest BESS manufacturing facility on the continent.
That facility, known as Dwa (the Polish word for “two,” in accordance with Northvolt’s naming convention) is being sold off as part of the company’s divestment of its battery systems manufacturing business during bankruptcy proceedings.
(Swedish auto manufacturer Scania, a subsidiary of Volkswagen, purchased the other part of the business earlier this year, including a factory that produced battery systems for construction and mining equipment. There is no formal collaboration between Scania and Lyten at this time, Lyten told Latitude Media, but the two are in discussions regarding potential collaboration in supply chains and potential commercial partnerships.)
Dwa came online in 2023 with an initial production capacity of five gigawatt-hours per year, with the potential to scale up to 12 GWh. The highly automated factory was designed to build and assemble Northvolt’s stationary storage systems for industrial, commercial, and utility grid applications.
Converting Dwa to a lithium-sulfur factory will be Lyten’s first foray into European production, and CEO Dan Cook said the company plans to restart operations “immediately.” (The companies plan to close the transaction in 2025’s third quarter.)
Ready to pounce
In the longer-term Lyten hopes to control its own supply chain, and sell into the electric vehicle market. In this way, the startup’s plans for scale aren’t too far off from those of Cuberg or Northvolt.
To start, Lyten has largely focused on selling batteries for drones and satellites, and is already shipping commercially to those customers. But next on the roadmap is an expansion into stationary storage.
Initially, Lyten hadn’t planned to move into the storage sphere until 2026. But in the first quarter of this year Lyten started to see a “significant spike” in demand, spurred in part by the uncertainty caused by President Trump’s on-again-off-again global tariffs. The biggest contributor to that spike, chief sustainability officer Keith Norman told Latitude Media in April, came from stationary storage developers.
Thanks to Lyten’s efforts to onshore its supply chain for U.S. manufacturing, the company was well-positioned to take advantage of the new demand for storage, which Norman attributed to the data center scramble.
In the wake of the Cuberg deal and these market shifts, Lyten created an internal team to focus solely on identifying potential acquisitions, Norman said. That team surveys available assets to find those that fit Lyten’s needs; they are keeping a close watch on dozens of gigafactories in the U.S. and Europe that are under strain, and could come on the market in the future.
Lyten is betting those potential acquisitions, plus the factories now converted from Northvolt, will allow it to move fast enough to meet market demand, without waiting for its own greenfield factory in Reno, Nevada, to start churning out batteries in 2027.
