Welcome to The Gigacasting Newsletter
New here? Subscribe for weekly updates
Toyota officially admits it’s developing the Gigacasting technology for its $2 billion Lexus plant in Shanghai "in-house", Chief Technology Officer Hiroki Nakajima told Bloomberg, and the company is currently running trials of the technology in Japan.
Nakajima gave the answer during an interview at Toyota's technical centre in Brussels, when he was asked whether Toyota is buying its Gigacasting machines from a local supplier. "This is a big chance to change the manufacturing system," he said. "Every time, the starting point is in house." Toyota declined to comment on potential suppliers. The Shanghai plant is still under construction and is due to start producing cars in 2027. It will be the first place where Toyota uses giant presses in series production, as part of its effort to regain ground in China, where its sales fell 19% in the first eight months of the year.
The project goes back to February 2025, when Toyota announced that Lexus would build a wholly owned plant in Shanghai dedicated to battery-electric vehicles, with an initial capacity of 100,000 units a year. It is the first foreign wholly owned car plant in China since Tesla's Giga Shanghai.
Gigacasting was part of the plan from the start, together with self-propelled production lines and an unboxed assembly process. The first model linked to the site, the LF-ZC, was later cancelled. Almost since the very beginning of this project I revealed that two 9,000-ton Gigacasting cells from Haitian were going into the plant,
In the summer of 2026, Chinese sources finally confirmed the rumors and wrote that the first 9,000-ton machine with an ultra-large automatic mold-change system was delivered and installed.
Source: The Japan Times (Bloomberg) — 16 Oct 2026
