A gigafactory is a large-scale battery cell and pack manufacturing plant, named for its annual production capacity measured in gigawatt-hours (GWh). Gigafactories are central to the EU industrial strategy for batteries, and their output is directly subject to Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 obligations including carbon footprint declaration, recycled content, conformity assessment, and — from 18 February 2027 — the battery passport for in-scope categories.
Because the battery passport must correspond to each individual battery, gigafactory production lines must capture and persist item-level data — the unique identifier, model-static specifications, and the data needed to populate the passport — at manufacturing scale.
Passport obligations attach per physical battery (Article 77(1)), so high-volume manufacturing must generate one compliant record per unit, not per model or lot.