In recent years, Europe has made ambitious attempts to carve out a foothold in the global battery industry, but high-profile setbacks have left the continent scrambling for a new competitive edge. Two major European battery players – Sweden’s Northvolt and Norway’s Morrow – have recently filed for bankruptcy, stoking widespread fears that Europe is already falling behind in the next wave of global battery technology transformation. Against this backdrop, Chinese manufacturers currently dominate global battery production, and the sector’s long road to commercialization combined with cutthroat global competition makes entering large-scale manufacturing a high-stakes gamble for any new entrant.
Now, a growing cohort of European investors and researchers are pinning their hopes on an unexpected solution: innovation at the nanoscale. A single nanometer measures just one-billionth of a meter, but this tiny scale is where many experts believe the next generation of transformative battery improvements will be born.
One pioneer in this space is Dutch deep tech firm LeydenJar, whose namesake draws from an 18th-century early electric cell prototype. The company leverages a semiconductor-derived technique called plasma deposition to manufacture an advanced pure silicon anode – a core component of lithium-ion batteries. While silicon has long been recognized as a low-cost, high-performance material for anodes, pure silicon naturally expands and contracts during charging and discharging cycles, causing the material to crack rapidly and degrade battery performance. Through plasma deposition, LeydenJar builds ultra-thin pure silicon foil one microscopically thin layer at a time, creating a stable structure that resists cracking. The innovation delivers dramatic improvements: according to the company, it can boost battery energy density by up to 50%, extend overall battery lifespan, and drastically cut charging times. “Where normally a pure silicon anode would fall apart, this remains stable, so it was a very wonderful invention,” says Christian Rood, LeydenJar’s chief executive officer. “We address the bottleneck in the battery.”
After a decade of research and development, LeydenJar is set to launch commercial-scale production at the end of 2026 – a timeline that underscores the heavy time and capital investment required for deep tech innovation. The company’s choice of Eindhoven, Netherlands for its production facility is no accident: the city is already a global hub for semiconductor manufacturing, home to industry giant ASML and a vast ecosystem of specialized suppliers. “A lot of people talk theoretically about ecosystems; I can tell you this is one of our sources of competitive advantage,” Rood explains. “It’s really the crossover from semiconductors to batteries that makes us different. Once you’ve demonstrated the principle in the lab, industrialization requires you to work with the semiconductor technology and suppliers. That means a lot of risk, but also a lot of opportunity in terms of patenting, in terms of securing your whole intellectual property. And that’s much more difficult to do in the US or in China.”
LeydenJar is not alone in its nanotech-focused battery push. Across the Netherlands and wider Europe, dozens of small deep tech startups are developing nanoscale innovations for the global battery supply chain. One of these is Delft-based startup Powall, which builds commercial-scale manufacturing equipment that applies nanocoatings to the raw powder materials used in conventional modern batteries. Like LeydenJar’s technology, the coating technique originated in the semiconductor industry, and operates at an incredibly tiny scale: individual powder granules measure in micrometers, while the protective coatings applied to them measure in nanometers. The process uses atomic layer deposition to uniformly coat each granule.
Roderik Colen, CEO of Powall, explains that the nanocoating solves a major durability problem that has kept many promising new battery materials from reaching commercial markets. “Your battery works less well than before after using it thousands of times – that degrading or aging can be slowed down when you’re using a nanocoating,” Colen says. “You can have an exciting new material with a higher capacity or fast charging, all these novel developments. They typically have one element which is very good, but they suffer on the durability side. And that means they will never be a commercial product. That’s where we then come in, to give them the protective coating to effectively enable these new materials.” The process, which mixes coated powders and coating materials in a gas stream to trigger a controlled chemical reaction, offers precise control over coating thickness and can be adapted to a wide range of battery materials, unlocking flexible performance improvements for manufacturers.
Unlike the large-scale gigafactory projects that have failed in Europe in recent years, neither LeydenJar nor Powall aim to produce full batteries end-to-end. Both firms maintain commercial partnerships with Asian battery manufacturers, positioning their innovations as critical niche components in the global supply chain. Their ambition echoes the strategy that made ASML a global leader in semiconductors: rather than competing directly in mass production, European firms can carve out a competitive position by owning critical, high-value technology steps. “The easy comparison is with semiconductors, where there’s really a race for the best chip technology,” Rood says. “ASML is not producing chips; it focuses on a critical step in the production of chips, and in that way, has a seat at the table when it comes to the whole semiconductor battle. This is our ambition as well – to have a position where our battery anode is so unique that we have an important position in the supply chain.”
Alexander Brown, a senior analyst at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics), notes that niche high-tech innovation could be a strong strategic fit for Europe’s existing industrial strengths. “I think having one part of the supply chain based in Europe is great and if that can be a very advanced technological part, which offers the opportunity for high margins, that’s fantastic,” Brown says. But he also cautions that competition and coexistence exist simultaneously in the global market, and China is actively working to develop domestic alternatives for all critical battery technologies, just as it is pushing to develop domestic alternatives to ASML’s semiconductor lithography equipment. “China is working very hard to develop local alternatives for technologies, including these niche technologies. It’s no secret that China would love to replace ASML – they’re working very hard to do that, and it’s not unforeseeable that they will achieve that goal eventually,” Brown says. “So, I think Europe has traditional strengths in developing very exquisite high-quality products, which can find markets all over the world. But I also think it’s important for that not to be the only strategy from the continent’s policy makers.”
Beyond technological hurdles, the sector also faces financing challenges in Europe. Even as LeydenJar prepares to launch commercial production, Rood notes that raising capital for deep tech battery innovation is far harder in Europe than in the U.S. or Asia, due to a lower risk appetite among European investors. “There is sufficient financing in Europe, but the risk attitude is quite different than in Asia and in the US,” Rood says. “That means for a company like us that you have to work with different sources of funding at the same time – government grants, debt financing, help from the European Investment Bank and investors willing to buy a share of the business. They set a lot of challenging conditions, and they all want to do their own due diligence. It’s hard work.”
Still, Colen argues that Europe’s existing innovation ecosystem, particularly in the Netherlands, puts the continent in a strong position to capitalize on nanotech battery innovation, as long as policymakers and investors are willing to accept the inherent risks. The global battery industry is still young, with massive new production capacity being built globally and manufacturers actively searching for performance-boosting new technologies. “It’s a relatively young industry where factories are being built left, right and centre. They’re searching for the right tech. So that’s where you can play a big role, because the volumes are huge,” Colen says. For Europe, the path to relevance in the global battery race may not require competing with Chinese manufacturers to build massive gigafactories. Instead, it may lie at the opposite end of the size scale – as Colen puts it, “small changes make big differences.”