Lots of companies around the world are building Gigafactories. My brother in law is working with a factory in China which is bigger than Tesla's.
Someple think there will be a glut.
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It depends on what the demand from the public will be. When a compelling and affordable EV is available in quantity (the Model 3), that could flip demand as a larger segment of the population get to see and drive a well designed EV.
The auto industry is so vast, the GigaFactory 1 in Nevada is only going to be able to meet 1% of the world car production and that's massively scaled up from only 1/2% before the Model 3 unveil. If demand ramps up fast, as it quite possibly might, production of batteries will be way behind demand for more than a decade.
Chinese batteries can be suspect. The Chinese are capable of making li-ion batteries that are as good as anybody's and the outside companies like Samsung and Panasonic with factories in China make sure their cells are made to their standards, but a lot of the domestically produced cells in China are very poor quality.
To make li-ion cells that last and have good capacity, some very expensive equipment must be used in the manufacturing process to ensure everything is made within spec. Most cells made by Chinese companies are assembled by hand, which is a lot cheaper, but the cells usually have a short life and their capacity is poorer than foreign cells.
If a massive battery factory is being made in China, it might be intended to make cells primarily for domestic use and these might be sub-par compared to what the rest of the world expects. The EV market inside China is very strong and a lot of those cars use the substandard cells, so there is plenty of domestic demand for poor quality cells. It's also possible the cells are going to be export standard and will be good quality. We won't know until they start production.
Making good li-ion cells is a capital intensive thing and not labor intensive, so China doesn't really have much of an advantage in making good quality cells. They only have an advantage at the bottom end of the market.
On top of the demand for EVs, the stationary storage market is likely going to be massive very soon. Solar is exploding and utilities absolutely need to be able to balance their load for when the sun doesn't shine. Same thing for wind power, the need to store that energy is growing too. So even if the EV market doesn't take off as expected, the factories can always make batteries for stationary storage applications.
