A little over a year after European battery-maker Northvolt formally filed for bankruptcy in Sweden, its factory in Skellefteå is set to host one of Europe’s largest data centers.
In the northern part of the country, Northvolt Ett was the biggest battery site in Europe not owned by Asian manufacturers, and accordingly was once meant to be a proof point for Europe’s battery ambitions. The company started construction on the gigafactory for lithium-ion batteries in 2019. It began delivering cells to European automotive customers in 2022, with plans to eventually ramp the factory to 60 gigawatt-hours of output.
Before that happened, however, Northvolt’s finances unraveled. And when the company’s Swedish assets ended up in bankruptcy proceedings, the factory went dark.
California battery startup Lyten, which finalized its acquisition of the site in February, is already in the process of restarting Ett’s cell lines. But to get the factory up to full capacity, and to expand its research and development operations in Sweden, Lyten is looking for more creative means of financing. That’s where data centers come in.
The “Lyten industrial hubs,” as the company is calling them, will leverage existing infrastructure at a manufacturing site for multiple types of industrial manufacturing alongside the battery factory, explained chief sustainability officer Keith Norman. The revenue from that business will support scaling Lyten’s battery manufacturing efforts, he added.
Today, the most valuable assets at the Ett site are actually the substations, hydropower contracts, and permits, Norman said. Lyten has signed a deal with EdgeConnex, a Virginia-based hyperscale data center developer and a subsidiary of Investment fund EQT, to develop a one-gigawatt data center at the site. Under that deal, EdgeConnex will own and operate the data center, relying on Lyten’s existing power contracts and utility infrastructure from the original Northvolt site.
Importantly, Norman added, the site has access to enough power that the capacity originally slated for the battery manufacturing plant won’t change.
The resulting data center, for which construction is expected to begin at the end of 2026, will result in more than $10 billion in infrastructure investment. Once operational, it will rank among the largest data center sites in Europe. The data center itself may also leverage Lyten’s batteries, Norman added; they can react to changes in power demand in a few thousands of a second, smoothing out the spikes and drops in electricity use from AI chips.
That’s an important part of what Lyten can offer its partners in these industrial hubs: not just access to power, but a tech solution to keep that power stable and reliable.
Lyten’s strategy
Lyten first stepped in to purchase Northvolt’s assets in 2024, just before it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States, and several months ahead of its eventual bankruptcies in Europe. Northvolt had shut down its lithium-metal subsidiary Cuberg in August that year, and Lyten swooped in to take over the lease and buy out all remaining equipment in a single deal.
The fact that Cuberg was manufacturing lithium-metal batteries wasn’t a problem for Lyten, a lithium-sulfur battery maker. Lyten’s strategy for growth relies in large part on salvaging failed battery factories — some of which never reached completion — and converting them over to lithium-sulfur production. It’s a strategy the company initially applied in Poland, where Lyten purchased Northvolt’s Dwa facility last fall, and which will ultimately host an industrial hub of its own, and now in Sweden.
While Lyten is building its own greenfield site in Nevada, that approach is expensive, slow, and overall risky, Norman said. Converting existing factories allows Lyten to get its batteries into customer hands much faster. And now, co-locating with a data center will make those operations significantly less risky financially.
But the industrial hub approach has other benefits too, Norman said: “One of the challenges with a singular battery manufacturing site is that if there’s no other big industrial manufacturing happening around it, you need to build…all the things that are necessary to manage that infrastructure and to support it.” By bringing in additional businesses, in this case a data center, Lyten is hoping to create “an ecosystem of talent” and shared supply chains and services that will ultimately benefit its manufacturing work.
“Battery manufacturing doesn’t fail because the product isn’t good, it’s usually the time it takes to get to scale,” Norman said. For Lyten, leveraging already-built factories and monetizing the assets for a customer like a data center is key to reaching scale without facing the same fate as Northvolt.
“It gives us a much more stable financing structure, and makes the site more financeable in general,” Norman explained. That in turn is bringing more capital in from public and private markets. “We believe it’s really giving us a great foundation to scale that solves one of the big problems of battery companies, which is, how do you finance this road from initial production to full scale manufacturing?”
