CATL Chairman Robin Zeng Talks About Solid-State Batteries

For centuries, every major transformation in human society has been closely tied to a transformation in the way we produce, store, and use energy.

Coal powered industrialization. Oil reshaped transportation. Electricity became the backbone of modern society. Today, another energy transition is underway, driven by electrification, renewable energy, artificial intelligence, and increasingly power-hungry digital infrastructure.

Electric vehicles are replacing combustion engines. Factories are becoming more automated. Data centers that support AI are consuming growing amounts of electricity. Wind and solar power are expanding rapidly, while energy storage is becoming increasingly important to keep electricity available when it is actually needed.

Behind all of these developments is a technology that often receives less attention than the applications built around it:

The battery.

Batteries influence the range of electric vehicles, the utilization of renewable energy, the stability of energy storage systems, the development of robotics, and even the way future power systems may operate.

That is why comments from Robin Zeng Yuqun, founder, chairman and CEO of CATL, deserve attention. CATL is one of the world’s largest battery manufacturers, and Zeng’s recent comments on solid-state batteries offer a useful perspective on where next-generation battery technology actually stands.

The issue is bigger than simply asking when solid-state batteries will enter mass production.

The more fundamental question is this:

As conventional lithium-ion battery technology approaches new bottlenecks, where will the next major breakthrough in energy technology come from?

A Discussion About Energy, Not Just Batteries

The discussion took place during the World Economic Forum’s 17th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, better known as the Summer Davos Forum, held in Dalian, China, from June 23 to 25, 2026.

At a session titled “No Power, No AI,” Zeng joined other business and technology leaders to discuss the relationship between artificial intelligence and energy.

The subject itself says a great deal about how the energy conversation has changed.

For years, batteries were mainly discussed in terms of electric vehicles: range, charging speed, cycle life, safety, and cost.

Today, those same technologies are being considered as part of a much larger energy system.

AI data centers require large amounts of reliable electricity. Renewable energy is growing, but solar and wind generation are inherently dependent on weather and time. Electric vehicles are increasingly being viewed not only as transportation but also as potential distributed energy resources.

In that context, batteries are no longer simply components inside cars.

They are becoming part of the infrastructure connecting transportation, electricity generation, energy storage, and digital technology.

That broader perspective is important when looking at what Zeng said about the future of battery technology.

“We Need More Innovation”

During the Dalian forum, a reporter from Daily Economic News asked Zeng how he viewed the development of China’s new energy industry.

His answer was brief: China’s new energy sector is developing strongly.

The reporter then asked a more practical question:

What does the upstream and downstream industry urgently need?

Zeng’s answer was equally direct:

“We need more innovation.”

The significance of the answer lies less in the words themselves than in the stage the industry has now reached.

Over the past decade, much of the new energy industry was focused on proving that technologies could work at scale.

Could electric vehicles offer sufficient range?

Could solar power be deployed economically?

Could batteries be mass-produced?

Could energy storage costs continue to fall?

Many of those questions have already received convincing answers.

The challenge is gradually changing.

The industry is now looking for the next technological leap.

That is where solid-state batteries enter the discussion.

How Much Further Can Lithium-Ion Batteries Go?

Modern lithium-ion batteries have already achieved an extraordinary level of development.

Energy density has increased. Charging has become faster. Cycle life has improved. Manufacturing has become highly automated and increasingly cost-efficient.

China has also developed one of the world’s most complete battery supply chains, covering materials, cells, battery packs, manufacturing equipment, energy storage, and vehicle applications.

But every mature technology eventually encounters bottlenecks.

Engineers can continue improving cathode materials, anodes, electrolytes, separators, cell structures, thermal management, and manufacturing processes. Yet the closer a technology gets to the limits of its existing architecture, the harder each additional improvement becomes.

The gains do not necessarily stop.

They simply become more difficult and more expensive to achieve.

That is one reason solid-state batteries have attracted so much attention.

The concept is not simply about producing another battery model. It represents an attempt to explore a different battery architecture by replacing the conventional liquid electrolyte with a solid electrolyte.

If the technical and manufacturing challenges can be solved, solid-state batteries could potentially provide improvements in areas such as energy density and safety.

But that leads to the question that matters most:

How mature is the technology today?

CATL’s Assessment: Level 4

At the Summer Davos discussion, Zeng offered a surprisingly cautious assessment.

According to Daily Economic News, he described all-solid-state battery technology as being at Level 4 on a 1-to-9 technology readiness scale, with Level 9 representing a mature technology capable of moving into mass production.

That number is important, but it needs to be understood correctly.

Level 4 does not mean solid-state batteries are impossible to manufacture.

It means the technology is still far from the level of maturity required for large-scale industrial deployment.

There is a substantial difference between demonstrating that a battery can work and building millions of reliable batteries at an acceptable cost.

That gap is where many emerging technologies struggle.

A laboratory cell can demonstrate a technical principle.

A commercial battery must survive manufacturing variation, supply-chain constraints, safety requirements, quality control, long-term reliability, and real-world use.

And after all of that, customers still have to be willing to pay for it.

This distinction is central to understanding Zeng’s comments.

Solid-State Batteries Are Not the “Holy Grail”

In an earlier interview with Caijing, Zeng was asked whether solid-state batteries represented the ultimate boundary of battery technology.

His answer was clear: not necessarily.

Solid-state batteries fundamentally change the state of the electrolyte, but that does not mean every other part of the battery suddenly reaches its technological limit.

Cathode materials, anode materials, cell architecture, voltage, manufacturing processes, and other areas still have room for innovation.

More importantly, Zeng questioned the logic of developing solid-state batteries simply because the technology sounds more advanced.

That distinction is easy to overlook.

A new technology does not automatically become a better commercial product.

If a new battery requires more expensive materials, more complicated manufacturing, tighter process control, and higher production costs, its advantages have to justify those disadvantages.

The technology must ultimately solve a real problem better than the alternatives.

One Difficult Problem: The Solid-Solid Interface

When asked what technical challenges remain for solid-state batteries, Zeng pointed to one particularly difficult area:

the solid-solid interface.

In a conventional lithium-ion battery, the liquid electrolyte can penetrate and maintain contact with electrode materials.

An all-solid-state battery does not have that same advantage.

The electrode and electrolyte are both solid materials, and lithium ions still need to move efficiently across the interface between them.

This creates a much more complicated manufacturing problem.

Different materials have different densities and mechanical characteristics. When multiple solid materials are compressed together, their deformation and compaction behavior can differ.

Zeng described situations in which extremely high pressure is used during processing, yet even laboratory samples can experience problems related to material alignment and contact.

This illustrates a larger challenge facing solid-state batteries.

The difficulty is not necessarily discovering the basic concept.

The difficulty is turning that concept into a repeatable industrial process.

And industrial processes are often where promising battery technologies face their hardest test.

Three Stages Before a Technology Becomes a Commodity

Zeng’s comments also provide a useful framework for judging emerging battery technologies.

He separates commercialization into three broad stages:

Technology. Product. Commodity.

The first stage is technological feasibility.

Can the technical route actually work? Are there fundamental problems that cannot be overcome?

The second stage is productization.

Can the technology be manufactured consistently? Is the supply chain reliable? Can the battery meet requirements for safety, reliability, durability, and performance?

The third stage is commercialization.

Can the product be produced at a competitive cost? Does it offer enough value? Is there real market demand?

A technology can succeed at one stage and fail at the next.

A laboratory breakthrough may never become a stable commercial product.

A technically successful product may still be too expensive for mass adoption.

And a commercially viable battery must ultimately compete against technologies that are already highly optimized.

This is why a technology-readiness number should not be confused with a production-volume forecast.

The engineering challenge is only one part of the journey.

Why Zeng Does Not Want to Define Solid-State Batteries by a Year

The question of timing inevitably comes up whenever solid-state batteries are discussed.

A reporter asked Zeng whether solid-state batteries could achieve large-scale commercialization before 2030, defining large-scale commercialization as deployment in roughly one million vehicles.

His response was cautious.

He considered million-vehicle deployment unlikely under that definition, largely because vehicles would need to achieve the necessary combination of performance and cost.

But his more interesting point was about how technological progress should be measured.

Zeng argued that technology should be defined by events and milestones rather than simply by dates.

He described the process as event-driven rather than time-driven, emphasizing that innovation cannot simply be scheduled.

This is an important distinction in an industry where companies frequently announce ambitious production targets years in advance.

A target date can be useful for planning.

It cannot guarantee that a technical problem will be solved by that date.

For solid-state batteries, the more meaningful milestones are therefore likely to be improvements in materials, interfaces, manufacturing processes, yield, reliability, safety, cost, and supply-chain stability.

Once those pieces come together, production can scale.

Until they do, a calendar year alone tells us very little.

Solid-State Is Not the End of Battery Innovation

There is another important message in Zeng’s comments.

Even if solid-state batteries eventually become commercially successful, they are unlikely to represent the final stage of battery development.

There are still opportunities in cathode chemistry, cell architecture, voltage, manufacturing technology, and other areas.

Zeng has also pointed to the possibility of higher-voltage battery systems as one area for future development. Current lithium-ion systems generally operate around the 4V range, while higher-voltage systems could potentially create additional room for energy-density improvements if the necessary materials and stability challenges can be solved.

This changes the way solid-state batteries should be viewed.

The future is unlikely to be a simple story in which liquid lithium-ion batteries disappear and solid-state batteries take their place.

Instead, battery technology will continue to evolve along multiple paths.

Some improvements will come from better versions of existing lithium-ion technologies.

Others may come from new chemistries, new structures, sodium-ion batteries, solid-state systems, or technologies that are not yet commercially visible.

The energy transition is not a single technological race.

It is a continuous process of solving one bottleneck after another.

From Batteries to the Energy System

Perhaps the most significant part of Zeng’s recent comments has little to do with solid-state batteries at all.

It is the changing role of the battery itself.

CATL has increasingly expanded its activities beyond batteries for passenger vehicles into energy storage, commercial transportation, electric ships, battery swapping, power systems, and other energy applications.

The underlying idea is straightforward:

Batteries are becoming part of the energy system rather than simply components within individual products.

This matters because renewable electricity creates a problem that conventional power systems were not designed around.

Solar power is generated when sunlight is available.

Wind power is generated when wind conditions are favorable.

But electricity demand does not necessarily follow either schedule.

The power grid is highly effective at moving electricity from one location to another.

Energy storage provides another capability: moving available energy from one point in time to another.

That makes batteries increasingly important as renewable generation grows.

The same principle applies to AI.

Data centers need large amounts of stable electricity. Robotics requires batteries with a combination of energy density, power output, weight, and reliability. Electric vehicles could potentially become distributed energy resources rather than remaining passive loads on the grid.

In other words, the battery is becoming part of a much larger energy architecture.

So, Why Does Solid-State Battery Technology Matter?

Because the next stage of electrification will demand more from batteries.

Electric vehicles need higher energy density and lower costs.

Energy storage needs safety, long life, and competitive economics.

Robots need compact batteries capable of delivering both energy and power.

AI infrastructure needs reliable electricity and increasingly sophisticated energy management.

The battery sits at the intersection of all these developments.

That does not mean solid-state batteries are guaranteed to become the dominant technology.

It means that the limitations of today’s lithium-ion architecture make the search for the next major breakthrough strategically important.

Zeng’s comments offer a useful reality check.

A technology demonstrated in a laboratory is not yet a commercial product.

A commercial product is not automatically a competitive commodity.

And a production target is not the same thing as technological maturity.

For solid-state batteries, the difficult work is now moving deeper into materials, interfaces, manufacturing, reliability, cost, and scale.

That is where the next breakthrough will have to happen.