Creating synergies between Silicon Valley and Europe: Lyten acquisition of Northvolt explained

10 September 2025

California-based Lyten, the global leader in lithium-sulfur batteries, has made the bold move to acquire the remaining assets of what was once Europe’s most ambitious battery manufacturer, Northvolt. These include its factories in Sweden (Skellefteå and Västerås), Germany (Heide) and Poland (Gdańsk), as well as valuable intellectual property.

Is Lyten’s acquisition of the Northvolt assets a win for Europe? And what is in it for Lyten? What makes Lyten’s lithium-sulfur technology different?

Lyten has been developing lithium-sulfur for 5 years, what makes this technology different is its high energy density, low cost, and limited depency on critical raw materials.

What makes lithium-sulfur batteries different is their simple supply chain, which does not create dependency on -external resources. Lithium-sulfur batteries do not require nickel, manganese, cobalt or even graphite but only sulfur or graphene and lithium metal. The need for fewer and basic raw materials, make lithium-sulfur batteries meet European energy independence.

“The bold move that we’ve made here with Northvolt, has a great backdrop to the electricity demand, which is expected to double over the next 25 years.”

The electricity demand in the world, is expected to double over the course of the next 25 years and transport will be at the core of this demand.  As most of the sources of energy will have to come from renewables, to fully exploit them we will need to pair them with batteries.

“We don’t really look at batteries as a climate tech component. They are rapidly evolving into a national security issue for many countries.“

Seen the central role batteries will play in the years to come, Lyten has decided to invest in lithium-sulfur batteries and that is why they mapped the idea of finding assets that could fall out from the circular trend.

“With this acquisition, we wanted to get ahead of the Asian domination trend in the battery sector as we have seen.“

Seen that lithium-sulfur can be largely produced on the same tools as conventional lithium-ion batteries, Lyten has been able to utilize the supporting infrastructure of the sites of Northvolt in Sweden, Germany and even Poland. With this acquisition, Lyten is benefiting from the largest and most advanced battery R&D facility in Europe.

“We have the right ingredients here to make this really a success, and pick up perhaps where Northvolt left off. Learn from the lessons learned from Northvolt and revisit some of the things that maybe didn’t necessarily work.”

The Lyten team in US and EU the excitement is growing by the day as they open up new capabilities between Silicon Valley and EU to share experience.

How will Lyten bring fresh energy to Europe’s battery future?

Lyten is looking forward to being able to announce customers in the near future. They are seeing demand from both the US and Europe, from multiple sectors, EVs, energy storage and defence and space in the US.

They are seeing not only demand for the conventional lithium-ion chemistries which will come off of these lines, but they are also seeing it for lithium-sulfur.

They give customers the opportunity to continue on in their pursuit of lithium-ion chemistry products coming from the Northvolt efforts and development pipeline and marrying that with lithium-sulfur so that the customers can make a graceful switch between the two.

“The excitement is growing by the day and as we open up and understand new capabilities and synergies that can exist between Silicon Valley in Europe.”

What advice would you give to the European policy makers?

Focus one line at a time, executing quality, executing consistency and output making customers happy with the products and looking past and not repeating some of the mistakes that were made before.

It’s about really outputting quality products to customers and meeting their expectations. Let’s call it under-promising and over-delivering if you will. There is an execution part that must happen to really rebuild credibility in my view.

In respect to regulatory steps that are necessary, there’s no question that safety and other baseline requirements are very important and of course we want to observe those. But we have to look at how we can streamline a business’s ability to get products to the market and this is again what happened in Silicon Valley. That helps innovation get to market in a timely fashion.

“Support of speed and execution I think are the key to bring about innovation without burning up cash”

Any other government dependency that may exist may cause delays. For innovation to happen, there’s needs to be investors who want to take the risk but they also have a time horizon that needs to be respected and when those two things diverge, you basically wind up burning up cash.  That creates a challenge from a financial perspective to young companies or even established companies that are trying to bring these products to market.