TOYO Begins Production At 2 GW Solar Cell Factory in Ethiopia

Japanese solar manufacturer TOYO has launched commercial operations of its solar cell factory in Ethiopia with 2 GW of annual production capacity.  

The factory officially started production on site in early April 2025 and is scheduled to deliver more than 80 MW of solar cells to customers by the end of this month. It will ramp up the plant to full capacity, achieving a monthly production capacity of 150 MW to 200 MW by May/June 2025.

It recently announced plans to double the Ethiopian facility’s nameplate capacity to 4 GW owing to ‘robust external customer demand’ and to feed its new 2 GW solar module factory in Texas, US (see TOYO Solar To Double Ethiopian Solar Cell Capacity To 4 GW). 

"We are very positive about the strong demand we are seeing in the market and are working diligently to execute the additional 2GW expansion in Ethiopia," said TOYO Chairman and CEO Junsei Ryu.  

TOYO’s solar cell factory commencement follows the US imposing harsh AD/CVD tariffs on solar cell and module imports to the country from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, which makes it imperative for US module manufacturers to seek alternate supply channels. India, Indonesia and Laos are perhaps next in line for AD/CVD investigations in the US (see US Solar Imports From Cambodia Hit Hardest With Final AD/CVD Duties). 

As Clean Energy Associates’ Senior Policy Analyst Christian Roselund explained in a LinkedIn post, “While cell manufacturing had largely moved from the four countries under investigation, this will wipe out the last holdouts, and prevent cell production from resuming in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.”