With incredible speed, Corning announced in its third-quarter earnings call that it has brought its Michigan silicon ingot and wafer plant online. Plans for the solar factory were first publicly revealed in October 2024. The facility is located on Corning’s Hemlock semiconductor campus and Hemlock polysilicon will be used for Corning’s new wafer factory.
Photo of a sun bar from Corning’s earnings report.
“Over the past 18 months, we built the largest solar ingot and wafer facility in the United States, co-located with our polysilicon manufacturing facility in Hemlock, Michigan. It was a significant undertaking,” said Wendell Weeks, chairman, president and CEO of Corning. “To give you an idea of the scale, the factory contains as much steel as the Salesforce Tower, San Francisco’s tallest skyscraper. The site is equivalent to 60 football fields, and the building itself takes up about a third of that.”
Corning has become increasingly involved in the domestic solar industry in the past year. The company activated inactive solar polysilicon assets at the Hemlock plant and has now committed more than 80% of its polysilicon and wafer capacity for the next five years. Corning will supply wafers to Suniva in Georgia to make cells for Heliene solar panels assembled in Minnesota. Corning also has a wafer supply agreement with T1, which has a solar cell facility under construction in Texas. In addition, Corning purchased the JA Solar module assembly facility in Phoenix, Arizona.
Although he now participates in nearly every step of the silicon solar panel supply chain, Weeks did not imply that Corning would also get into the solar cell game.
“Our focus area has been on blocks and wafers. And yes, we also wanted to have a go-to-market position in modules, especially as we have some new innovations to offer that could increase conversion efficiency and provide some of the best products or perhaps the best product in the world for solar,” he said during the earnings call. “We would like to see the U.S. supply chain be able to make products that are competitive against the landed solar products made abroad. Our focus will be on those areas where we can be really strong. We would prefer to source the cell part from other U.S. manufacturers over time. But somehow we want to leverage our innovation so that the U.S. can produce solar energy domestically.”
The Michigan wafer plant currently produces thousands of solar wafers every day, and Corning expects to soon reach more than 1 million solar wafers produced per day. There is no confirmed gigawatt equivalent of the wafer factory production capacity. Corning plans to grow its solar business to a revenue stream of $2.5 billion by 2028.
This makes Corning the first waffle factory in the United States to come online in more than a decade. The last producer of solar wafers in the United States was SolarWorld, which once made every step of the silicon solar panel in Oregon. The company went bankrupt at the end of 2010.
Qcells has been working on its all-inclusive solar panel campus in Georgia, but no official word has been released on the wafer production operations. Plans for NorSun’s wafer factory in Oklahoma have stalled.
