CORNEX’s Xiangyang facility went from groundbreaking to first product in ten months, a genuine construction achievement the company says beat its own schedule by two months. The plant itself is rated at 70 gigawatt-hours of annual capacity, and it is only one of four Hubei province bases that together give CORNEX, a manufacturer with little name recognition outside China, 110 gigawatt-hours of capacity already operating and 500 gigawatt-hours planned in total.
CORNEX broke ground on its Xiangyang lithium battery industrial park on October 28, 2025, and reached first production roughly ten months later, with the project’s first cell manufacturing workshop reaching structural topping out after just three months of construction. Chairman Dai Deming said the plant hit its production target two months ahead of internal schedule. The site spans 1,608 mu, about 107 hectares, with 1.05 million square meters of floor space, and carries a total investment of 22 billion yuan, roughly 3 billion dollars, according to project filings. Once fully ramped, the facility is expected to ship close to 400,000 cells daily, generate more than 30 billion yuan in annual output and employ more than 5,000 people, producing large-format storage cells in 100, 588 and 648 amp-hour formats alongside high-rate, fast-charging traction batteries for vehicles.
What the announcement does not mention is where Xiangyang sits within CORNEX’s broader buildout. The facility is rated at 70 gigawatt-hours of annual capacity and is one of four manufacturing bases the company operates across Hubei province, alongside Wuhan, Yichang and Xiaogan. As of May 2026, those four bases together held 110 gigawatt-hours of operational effective capacity, with a further 390 gigawatt-hours under construction or formally planned, bringing CORNEX’s total disclosed capacity target to 500 gigawatt-hours. The Yichang base alone has a second phase, 80 gigawatt-hours focused on ultra-high-capacity 472 and 688 amp-hour cells, targeting commissioning by September 2026, on a construction timeline nearly as compressed as Xiangyang’s. Wuhan received energy-saving review approval in April for a 90 gigawatt-hour expansion, with Yichang and Xiaogan each approved for 100 gigawatt-hours of additional planned capacity the same month.
That scale is worth measuring against China’s actual battery production over the same period. Combined power and energy storage battery output across the entire country reached 1,286.9 gigawatt-hours in the first seven months of 2026, an annualized pace of roughly 2,200 gigawatt-hours, according to data from the China Automotive Battery Innovation Alliance. CORNEX’s disclosed 500 gigawatt-hour total planned capacity, built out from a single company operating exclusively within one province, equates to close to a quarter of that entire national annualized production run rate, from a manufacturer with a fraction of the public visibility of CATL or BYD. That scale of ambition from a comparatively obscure player illustrates how far China’s battery capacity buildout extends beyond the handful of companies most global coverage focuses on.
That expansion is also proceeding into a supply chain that independent industry tracking already shows running well below installed capacity. LFP cathode material, the input feeding directly into cells like those Xiangyang now produces, carried nameplate manufacturing capacity above 6 million tonnes in 2024 against actual shipments of about 2.4 million tonnes, a utilization rate below 40%, with several listed materials suppliers reporting losses for more than 36 consecutive months and debt-to-asset ratios as high as 68%. CORNEX’s cell-level capacity additions do not directly resolve that upstream overcapacity, and the company’s rapid buildout of finished cell manufacturing is occurring while the materials layer beneath it remains substantially underutilized by the industry’s own measures.
CORNEX does have order flow to point to. The company signed 50 gigawatt-hours in storage battery supply agreements at the CIBF battery industry conference in May 2026, and reported that its effective production capacity across its Xiaogan, Wuhan and Yichang bases had already exceeded 110 gigawatt-hours with more than 160 domestic and international product certifications completed. Trade press covering those agreements, however, noted plainly that the company’s ability to execute them “will depend on its manufacturing ramp-up,” an acknowledgment that a signed framework agreement and delivered, paid production volume are not the same commitment, particularly for a company adding capacity as quickly as CORNEX has across four sites simultaneously. The company is also extending the same model overseas, signing an agreement in January 2026 with Egypt’s Kemet Industries Group for a 5 gigawatt-hour energy storage battery factory backed by approximately 200 million dollars of investment, a pattern of routing expanding Chinese manufacturing capacity into third-country assembly bases that mirrors what has already occurred in China’s solar and electrolyser export sectors.
The product specifications CORNEX highlighted, large-format 588 and 648 amp-hour storage cells and fast-charging traction batteries, place the company squarely in the same technical race as its larger rivals rather than in a differentiated niche. CATL introduced a 575 amp-hour cell format for its own utility-scale TENER H storage system earlier this year, and the broader industry trend toward ever-larger cell formats for grid-scale storage is being pursued simultaneously by most major Chinese manufacturers, meaning CORNEX’s technical progress adds capacity to an already crowded segment of the market rather than opening new demand on its own. The ten-month construction timeline at Xiangyang is a genuine and consistent operational capability, matched by comparably fast execution at CORNEX’s other Hubei sites, but the more consequential test facing the company is not how quickly it can build cell manufacturing capacity. It is whether 500 gigawatt-hours of planned output, from one manufacturer among many pursuing the same expansion simultaneously, can find buyers in a market where the materials feeding directly into that capacity are already running at less than half their own installed capability.
