Suniva, a U.S. manufacturer of monocrystalline silicon solar cells, on Tuesday announced plans to build a 4.5-GW solar cell manufacturing facility in Laurens, South Carolina, bringing its total domestic manufacturing capacity to over 5.5 GW.
The company is investing $350 million to build the facility and anticipates bringing it online in the second quarter of 2027. The additional manufacturing capacity will make Suniva “the largest of any merchant solar cell manufacturer in the United States,” according to a company release.
U.S. manufacturing of the upstream components that constitute a solar panel — such as cells, wafers and ingots — has increased in the last few years, spurred by Inflation Reduction Act tax credits like the 45X advanced manufacturing production credit.
“With the race to build power to meet AI data center demand, an expansion in U.S. solar cell capacity could matter because it targets an important remaining bottleneck in the domestic stack, at a moment when regulations, stricter tax-credit qualification requirements, and trade enforcement are all increasing the value of supply chain resilience and reshoring,” Keith Adams, Deloitte’s U.S. renewable energy leader, said in an email to Utility Dive.
In October, the U.S. fully onshored its solar supply chain when Corning’s Michigan silicon ingot and wafer factory came online, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Despite this, “cells, wafers, ingots, and polysilicon remain import-reliant,” Deloitte said in an October report, while “module production has expanded sevenfold to 56.5 GW since 2022.”
”2025 was a monumental year for the U.S. solar manufacturing industry,” SEIA said in a March report. “New cell capacity continued to expand, and wafer capacity came online for the first time since 2016 ... However, the actual production of these facilities remains considerably below domestic demand.”
The Coalition for a Prosperous America, a lobbying group that represents manufacturers and advocates for protectionist measures such as tariffs, said the “expansion highlights the critical importance of rebuilding the domestic crystalline silicon photovoltaic supply chain.”
“As electricity demand surges, driven in part by data centers and advanced computing, the United States must rapidly scale energy generation capacity,” the coalition said in a release. “Solar is uniquely positioned to meet this demand, but doing so securely requires a fully domestic supply chain.”
Suniva previously declared bankrupcy in 2017, citing the “dumping of Chinese solar products” into the U.S. as a reason it was experiencing “significant losses.” The company exited bankruptcy in 2019.
Suniva’s release said this move to onshore “ensures that the clean energy powering American homes and businesses is not subject to foreign supply chain risk or geopolitical disruption.”
“At this moment in history, the question of where our energy comes from — and who controls the supply chain that delivers it — is among the most consequential questions America faces,” said Matt Card, Suniva’s president and COO.
