Asia Tech Wire (May 23) -- Tesla Inc. officially broke ground on its Shanghai Megapack battery plant on Thursday afternoon.

The plant, which sits in the Lin-gang Special Area of China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone, is due to go into production in the first quarter of 2025.

When the plant goes into operation, it will annually produce up to 10,000 units of the Megapack, a utility-scale energy storage system, with an energy storage scale of nearly 40 gigawatt-hours.

This is Tesla's first energy storage gigafactory outside the U.S., and another large-scale investment project in China in the ten years since Tesla entered the country, following its Shanghai superfactory, where it produces electric cars.

In 2019, Tesla's Shanghai superfactory in the Lin-gang Special Area madae "construction, production and delivery all in the same year" a reality.

China's state-owned broadcaster CCTV reported that it took only one month from the negotiation to the signing of the contract for the Shanghai Megapack battery plant, once again breaking the "Lin-gang speed".

Tesla's Shanghai superfactory has an annual production capacity of more than 950,000 pure electric vehicles, and is an important production base and export center for Tesla worldwide.