TheChek News Flow

Robin Zeng, exacting and detail obsessed, keeps a stranglehold over a market that touches everything from AI data centers to electric cars. Even if Silicon Valley wanted to, it couldn’t live without him.

One after the other, four men jumped onto a stage at the front of a darkened, crowded hall one recent evening in central Beijing. Each of them was fired up. The subject: superadvanced batteries.

One of these batteries, a man said, was perfect to power ultra-cheap electric vehicles and another for ultraexpensive ones. A third could almost completely charge a car in 11 minutes, while a fourth could do so in just 6. There was even a battery that could power a big flying car. All of the batteries, the men suggested, were superior to anything available anywhere else.

Presiding over the show from a front-row seat was billionaire Robin Zeng, co-founder and CEO of Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. Zeng is one of China’s richest people and perhaps the ultimate avatar of the country’s in-your-face confidence that this is its moment. Arguably more than any other single Chinese entrepreneur, 58-year-old Zeng powerfully reflects the stark threat that many in the West fear in China’s growing technological prowess.

The evening’s climax came when the spotlight went to Zeng, who spent the time depicting his company as a rare island of serious science in an industry filled with “concepts and buzz.” If some unnamed rivals weren’t keeping up with CATL—local or foreign, he didn’t specify—it was because they were wasting their time with “magic solutions to all problems.”

“We don’t blindly follow what’s new, big or what’s trending,” Zeng said. “Instead, we stay honest with problems, respect the laws of nature and verify results rigorously. Science is not hype.”

Though you may have only vaguely—or possibly never—heard of Zeng and CATL, he and his company are to batteries what Jensen Huang and Nvidia are to AI chips. CATL manufactures about 40% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, which power electric vehicles, drones, robots, grid systems and AI data centers, including xAI’s gigantic Colossus complex in Memphis. It also owns stakes in much of the metals and component supply chain it uses in those batteries. The company’s closest competitor, China’s BYD, supplies roughly 14% of the world’s batteries. U.S. companies collectively have less than 2% of the global battery market.

CATL has managed to produce big profits in a cutthroat industry in which most of its Chinese rivals lose money. Last year, its profit rose 42% year on year to $10.5 billion, dwarfing every other major battery company in the world. Investors have piled into CATL shares, sending up its stock price 36% in the year to date. Since June 2020, they have risen nearly 350%. (Zeng, who owns 22.5% of the company, is worth $56.3 billion, according to Forbes, which makes him about as rich as SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.)

With the U.S. and the rest of the West moving increasingly to battery-powered technology, CATL’s dominance has put it—and by extension Zeng—in a position of geostrategic significance. China worries about America’s stranglehold on the most advanced semiconductors. The U.S. would be smart to worry about China’s stranglehold on the world’s best batteries. CATL’s success is in fact a repudiation of the central U.S. policy for fighting Chinese technology, which is to effectively ban it. While CATL’s batteries face stiff tariffs, they have long been in the U.S., powering Tesla Megapacks and EVs made by both Ford and General Motors.

If CATL vanished tomorrow, it would be akin to the disappearance of OPEC from the oil market: There would be no immediate way to make up for the shortage of batteries.

“CATL truly is just really far ahead,” said Vivas Kumar, a Tesla veteran and the CEO of California battery startup Mitra Chem. “It sets the tempo that the rest of the industry has to follow.”

The company insists that most automakers commit to multiyear supply contracts at a premium price above that of rival batteries, multiple Chinese EV executives told me. Those that resist the premium pricing may face the threat of losing access to its batteries, these executives said. Usually that cudgel is sufficient to bring most carmakers to heel. They’re willing to cave to CATL because, simply, they view CATL’s batteries the most consistent performers in an industry in which batteries frequently don’t deliver as promised.

CATL did not provide an interview with Zeng for this story. However, judging by what he’s said publicly in recent years, Zeng truly seems to see no competition. He is dismissive of challenges from the West. In a 2024 interview, he said Western battery makers haven’t caught up with CATL because they start with a fundamental lack of understanding of electrochemistry. They fall short “because they have the wrong design. And second, they have the wrong process. And third, they have the wrong equipment,” Zeng said.

Western battery makers also lack a strong bench of scientific talent, Zeng has said, since its engineering graduates are usually drawn to high-paying jobs in Silicon Valley tech companies, spurning comparatively lower-paying positions in material science. CATL, meanwhile, has some 23,000 research and development workers—the source of those batteries the company announced in Beijing.

In Beijing, Zeng said CATL has an “adversarial team” of 500 engineers whose only job is to poke holes in everyone else’s work. If anyone has any beef with the team’s findings, they have to answer to Zeng himself. “They are the least popular people in the company,” he said, “but I am the leader of these people.”

For U.S. industry veterans, the question is whether you work with or around this immovable rival. Bob Galyen, a former GM executive who went on to become chief technology officer of CATL, is among those veterans pushing the U.S. to move faster to catch up.

As of now, “our society is behind, and it’s scary,” he told me. “Everybody accuses China of stealing our technology. Why don’t we either take it back or work with them, one of the two?”

Early Western help—American and German—played a key role in making CATL what it is today.

First, in 2004, Apple was looking for a local battery manufacturer to power its new iPod, and CATL’s predecessor company, ATL, won the contract.

That triumph proved pivotal because Apple helped hammer ATL into shape as a global-quality manufacturer. ATL soon had a reputation in the West for reliably producing the small, high-quality batteries required for portable electronic devices such as laptops and cellphones. “Apple kicked their ass: There would be no CATL without Apple,” said a former Western car executive who met with ATL around this time.

The second break came in 2012 with a contract to design even bigger batteries. The customer was BMW, which had plans to produce an EV in China. When I recently spent a day at CATL’s headquarters in southeastern China, a company official recounted how to get the Chinese company ready for the tougher requirements of EV batteries, the German carmaker supplied it with an approximately 800-page manual of technical specifications.

The Chinese executives and employees of the newly branded CATL absorbed that manual like it was the Talmud. The promise behind meeting the German company’s hyperstrict engineering standards was that “if you can do as they say, then you have this [engineering] capability. And if you can supply BMW, you can supply everybody,” the CATL official said.

About the same time, Zeng recruited Galyen, a long-time GM executive, as CTO. Galyen, who held the position for seven years, agreed that the Apple and BMW contracts were crucial, the second building on the first.

“Robin and I sat down, and he said, ‘Let’s work with BMW. I wanna be the best of the best. And the only way to get to be the best of the best is work with the best,’” Galyen recalled. “I think his experience with Apple kind of drove him to this.”

When Galyen arrived in 2012, the company had around 300 engineers. Zeng began a hiring spree in the thousands to manage the BMW deal and other new contracts with local Chinese carmakers, said Galyen, who set out to train them.

Galyen said he trained the new employees to take an ultrafussy approach to producing a battery. He made them take a new look at each of the raw materials and fundamental components they were working with in the batteries they were making. On each, he said, “I looked at the spec, and I said, ‘This is not good enough.’ I went through it with a fine-tooth comb.”

That exhaustiveness eventually resulted in thousands of individual quality checks before completion of each battery. CATL imposed such exactitude believing it would help differentiate its products in a market then dominated by Japan’s Panasonic and South Korean battery makers. After a few years, Galyen’s trainees were checking more than 3,600 aspects of the battery before it went out the door, he said.

Chris Burns was one of the Westerners who made their way to the remote city of Ningde, where CATL is headquartered, in the middle to late 2010s. His Canadian startup, Novonix, made equipment that delivered ultrahigh-precision measurements of battery quality during manufacturing, and CATL was in the throes of buying a 33% equity stake in that business. Back in the West, Burns was seeing battery industry startups spring up with aspirations for levels of production that seemed big but were infinitesimal compared with what he saw Zeng was building.

Meeting Zeng over tea, Burns could see that the CATL leader had “wild growth aspirations,” which included building high-rise towers to house its workers. “It was crazy to see the difference in the amount of investment they made, the amount of people,” Burns said. “His vision was clear. They were going to become No. 1 globally in battery production.”

In the battery industry, the key to such growth and profitability is production yield—how many batteries you can make without wasteful defects. In the West, one measure of success is achieving just a few defects per million battery cells, or parts per million, a rate akin to the acceptable defect rate in consumer electronics. At CATL, the measure is defects per billion cells, or parts per billion, Zeng and other CATL executives have said—the life-and-death rates demanded in the pharmaceutical industry.

Today, Western battery and component startups want to grow into gigantic companies, but no one can match CATL’s production yield. “To achieve PPB-level quality for these prismatic cells is crazy impressive,” said Peter Attia, CTO of Glimpse AI, a Massachusetts startup that uses CT scanning equipment to detect battery defects. “No one else I know of is at the level where we can even quantify parts per billion.”

In April, I attended the Beijing Auto Show, a sprawling event that has become the global car industry’s premier annual gathering. CATL had a substantial presence at the show, with a gigantic booth that included a prototype flying car made by its AutoFlight subsidiary. One evening, CATL hosted an invitation-only cocktail party at the swank Mandarin Oriental Hotel, where guests could rub shoulders with its AI and battery researchers, a demonstration of soft power not often associated with the battery industry.

Participants dispersed to other social gatherings as well. At one dinner I attended, current and former executives of Chinese car companies groused about CATL. Their complaint wasn’t about quality—but rather about the contractual arm-twisting that went along with CATL’s knowledge of its superiority.

In 2022, for instance, XPeng, an EV startup based in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, rejected CATL’s demands and gave its business to smaller competitors such as Sunwoda and Eve Energy, according to people familiar with the episode. An XPeng spokesperson confirmed that the carmaker had stopped buying batteries from CATL, but said the two companies were speaking about resuming their relationship. Such is the nature of doing business with CATL—it’s hard to ever entirely walk away from the company.

Along with the griping about CATL’s domineering nature, another thing that especially caught my attention in Beijing was the company’s fast-charging battery: the one that can juice up a vehicle in as little as 6 minutes. It is CATL’s response to one of the key consumer misgivings about buying EVs—that they take too long to recharge. A company that could successfully mainstream a fast-charging battery would be looking at a jackpot commercial opportunity, which might further accelerate the world’s long-awaited mass transition to electric automobiles.

In May, Chinese carmaker Geely became the first CATL client to deploy the battery, installing it in its $65,000 Zeekr 009 minivan, according to Phate Zhang, founder and editor in chief of CnEVPost, a China-based auto industry news site. Zeekr said the vehicle could go 300 miles on a charge, the driving range sought by most mainstream motorists.

In the 15 or so years I have been watching batteries, Western experts have consistently said such a fast charging rate wasn’t possible without burning out the battery. Fast charging equates to lithium moving rapidly within the battery from the cathode to the anode, where it is stored. The Western consensus was that graphite anodes simply could not absorb lithium at such high speeds. Rather than entering the anode, the lithium would simply pile up on its surface, potentially ruining the battery.

I asked CATL researchers how they pulled it off. They described tinkering with the battery’s capacity to withstand the intense heat that built up with fast charging, including making changes to the cathode and electrolyte. They said they also engineered the anode into multiple layers to open up space and allow the lithium to move more freely. The lithium no longer piled up on the outside of the anode, allowing the battery to charge quickly.

Back at home, I asked Western companies whether they were now working on such a fast-charging battery. How did they get it wrong all along and where was their version? Mostly I got the same silence as when I asked about defect rates. Ford didn’t respond, and South Korea’s LG Energy Solution declined to comment.

Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery and sustainability, said making such batteries was possible but would entail losing other important capabilities, such as long driving range. The electric Chevy Equinox and Cadillac Optiq both deliver a little over 300 miles of range and take around 35 minutes to charge from 10% to 80% of capacity.

“In all of our studies,” Kelty said, “the biggest thing customers want is range. And the second biggest thing they want is…lower cost. Fast charge is what customers also want, but that’s not in the top two.”

Of course, CATL was showing that fast charging didn’t necessarily require the sacrifice of long range. Yet again, it had eclipsed the competition. Ultrafast charging was now another of the multiple ways in which CATL was playing in the major league, with everyone else more or less in the minors. And it is still building on that lead.

CATL has been pushing aggressively abroad, launching production in Germany and building plants in Hungary and Spain. But tensions between the U.S. and China appear to preclude any chance that CATL itself will start production in the U.S. anytime soon. Last year, the Pentagon added CATL to its procurement black list, claiming that it had links to the Chinese military, a designation that doesn’t prevent private companies from using its batteries but is something of a scarlet letter. It is true that Zeng is a member of the Communist Party’s top political advisory body, but he has denied selling batteries to the military or having any links to it.

CATL is a major player in stationary storage batteries for AI data centers, the grid and businesses, and Zeng expects such batteries to make up half of its business in the future. In Memphis, xAI has installed 2.3 gigawatt-hours of CATL batteries at its Colossus AI data center, the equivalent of the power used by 480,000 homes for four hours. U.S. humanoid robot makers are secretive about their batteries, but CATL’s batteries power humanoids made by China’s AgiBot.

Ford has become the most prominent proxy for CATL in the U.S. auto industry, licensing its technology to make both EV and stationary storage batteries in Michigan and Kentucky. At CATL’s headquarters in China, maps on display identify those as CATL locations. Ford says it’s in control of those factories, though as recently as last week it boasted in a blog post of “the success of Ford’s work with CATL, the world’s leading battery manufacturer.”

Increasingly, there is recognition in the West of CATL’s triumph. Halle Cheeseman, who recently retired as a manager at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy division, which funds research into new forms of energy, is among those hoping someone in the West invents and scales up a next-generation battery that eclipses what CATL does today.

“Hats off to them, really,” Cheeseman said.