SoftBank to make next-gen zinc-halogen battery cells in Japan for AI data centers

Japanese investment conglomerate SoftBank Group said its telecommunitions arm, SoftBank Corp in Japan, will build zinc-halogen battery cells and storage systems for the Japanese market, and scale to 1 GWh per year.

Manufacturing will take place of both batteries and solar panels at SoftBank’s factory in Osaka, Japan, and the site will house both an AI data center and AI hardware plant. On the battery side, it will partner with South Korea-based battery company Cosmos Lab and AI firm DeltaX Co.

Cosmos Lab will work with SoftBank on what it called next-generation zinc-halogen battery cells, and work with DeltaX on the battery designs. Two ventures will be established, with AX Factory to serve as a hub for AI data center operations and hardware manufacturing, and GX Factory that will serve as a manufacturing hub for next-generation batteries, solar panels and related products.

From the press release, Softbank said “At the GX Factory, SoftBank plans to begin manufacturing battery cells and energy storage systems from the fiscal year ending March 31, 2028 (FY2027), with the aim of achieving mass production on a gigawatt-hour (GWh)-per-year scale by around FY2028.”

Zinc-Halogen

Zinc-halogen batteries use pure water as the electrolyte, adding innate safety to the design. Aqueous zinc-ion batteries have been pursued in the past, both in labs and in production, but have a tiny share of the battery market. Halogens elements include iodine, bromine, or chlorine.

Generally, the practical implementation of halogen cathodes face challenges. These, according to peer reviews, include intrinsically low electrical conductivity, severe corrosion, and competing hydrolysis reactions. However, reletive abundance of key materials may make them cost effective, along with intrinsically safe, with a relatively long lifetime.