Battery technologies will be central to the UK’s transition to net zero, underpinning the electrification of transport, supporting renewable energy storage, and enabling the wider decarbonisation of industry. Yet despite the UK’s strength in battery research and innovation, a longstanding gap in industrial-scale development infrastructure has limited the UK’s ability to translate promising technologies into commercial manufacturing opportunities.

To address this challenge, CPI and WMG at the University of Warwick, both part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, launched the Advanced Materials Battery Industrialisation Centre (AMBIC) in June 2025, following an 18-month capital and infrastructure project, through a £12 million investment from UK Research and Innovation’s Faraday Battery Challenge.

AMBIC was established to address a critical gap in the UK battery ecosystem: the lack of domestic infrastructure to scale and validate advanced battery materials between laboratory development and commercial production.

Without access to industrially-relevant pilot-scale facilities, many UK battery innovators have historically been forced to seek overseas manufacturing partners to scale novel materials and validate performance. This introduces significant cost, delays development, increases intellectual property risk, and weakens the UK’s ability to retain downstream manufacturing and supply chain value. AMBIC provides a strategic national capability to overcome this barrier.

Operating across CPI’s NETPark facility in Sedgefield, County Durham and WMG’s battery development facilities in Coventry, the centre enables companies to scale advanced battery materials from laboratory quantities to industrially-relevant pilot batches, before validating them in prototype cells. This integrated powder to-cell approach gives innovators the technical and commercial evidence needed to secure investment, develop offtake agreements, and progress towards market deployment.

By reducing the risks associated with battery scale-up, AMBIC is helping accelerate the commercialisation of next-generation battery technologies while strengthening the UK’s position in a rapidly expanding global market. And its impact extends beyond individual projects.

Battery demand is expected to increase significantly over the coming decade as electric vehicles, grid-scale storage, and wider electrification drive global market growth. Capturing economic value from this transition will depend not only on battery cell manufacturing, but on the development of robust domestic supply chains for the high-value materials that underpin battery performance.

Cathode, anode, and electrolyte materials account for a significant share of battery value, with cathode materials alone accounting for around half of the battery cell cost in many lithium-ion chemistries. By enabling these materials to be developed and scaled in the UK, AMBIC helps create the conditions for more of that value to be retained domestically through manufacturing, inward investment and supply chain growth.

In doing so, the centre supports the UK’s broader ambitions to build strengthened capability in strategically important advanced manufacturing sectors and reduce reliance on overseas pilot-scale processing and validation infrastructure.

AMBIC also strengthens resilience across the UK battery supply chain. As global competition intensifies for critical minerals and battery manufacturing capacity, nations with domestic capability to develop, validate and industrialise battery materials will be better positioned to secure investment and respond to future supply chain disruption. AMBIC equips the UK with the infrastructure needed to support this strategic capability, enabling companies to scale both established and emerging chemistries, including lithium-ion, sodium-ion and solid-state battery materials.

Alongside economic and industrial benefits, AMBIC supports the UK’s sustainability ambitions. The centre enables innovators to assess the environmental and economic viability of battery technologies before full commercial deployment, combining pilot-scale technical development with life cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis. This helps ensure that emerging battery technologies are designed for both performance and sustainability from the outset.

AMBIC also supports the development of circular-economy solutions, including battery recycling and critical-mineral recovery processes, helping build a more sustainable and resource-efficient battery ecosystem for the UK.

Importantly, the centre operates as an open-access national asset, making advanced battery development infrastructure available to organisations of all sizes, from university spin-outs and SMEs to large industrial manufacturers. By lowering barriers to access, it broadens participation in the UK battery ecosystem and helps accelerate innovation across the sector. Significant national and international interest has been generated since AMBIC launched in June 2025, with numerous projects in delivery and development.

AMBIC demonstrates the strategic value of investing in translational infrastructure that bridges the gap between research excellence and industrial deployment. By providing the infrastructure, expertise and collaborative environment needed to translate battery breakthroughs into commercial reality, AMBIC is creating the conditions for more value to be retained within the UK economy from the energy transition, strengthening industrial resilience, and building the supply chains needed for a net-zero future.