Mota-Engil Just Signed €207 Million to Build Portugal's First Gigafactory. Its Client Is Chinese, and Brussels Is Rewriting the Rules on Who Counts as European

Count the European gigafactory sites where a contractor is actually mobilising plant this summer. Then check who signs the payment certificates. The answer is uncomfortable for a continent that has spent five years promising itself a homegrown battery industry: most of the construction contracts still being signed are for clients headquartered in China.

On 25 May 2026, Mota-Engil filed a market notice confirming that its subsidiary Mota-Engil Engenharia e Construção had signed a contract worth €207.3 million with CALB (Europe), S.A. for Phase 1 of the New Sines Gigafactory in Portugal. The programme runs 22 months across an intervention area of roughly 17 hectares, with about 62,000 square metres of construction. The scope listed in the filing is worth reading closely: workshops, a voltage reduction station, a building for the integrated power plant, a chemical storage area, an NMP storage area, a solid waste treatment unit, a waste collection station, a wastewater treatment unit and gatehouses, plus specialised installations, factory equipment installation and secondary cabling.

CALB is China Aviation Lithium Battery. The wider Sines plant is a roughly €2 billion, 15 GWh investment that Portugal has designated a Project of National Interest, backed by about €350 million of state incentives signed off in January 2026. First output is targeted for 2028.

The European champions stopped building. The Chinese ones started

The contrast is stark. Northvolt, once the flagship of European cell manufacturing, filed for bankruptcy in March 2025 in what became the largest insolvency in modern Swedish history, taking roughly 100 GWh of planned 2030 capacity out of the pipeline with it. Around 300 subcontractors had been working the Skellefteå site. The collapse of Northvolt Ett Expansion AB, the entity managing construction, left local groundworks and specialist firms carrying unpaid invoices running into millions of kronor.

Automotive Cells Company, the joint venture of Stellantis, Mercedes-Benz and TotalEnergies, told employee representatives in February 2026 that its Kaiserslautern and Termoli plants were definitively shelved after nearly two years on hold. Cellforce and Volvo Group have also pulled back.

Now look at what is moving. CATL and Stellantis have broken ground at Figueruelas near Zaragoza on an 89-hectare, €4.1 billion, 50 GWh joint venture with a phased build running to 2030. EVE Energy is putting €1.3 billion into a 30 GWh plant in Debrecen, next door to BMW. Hithium won an €81 million Spanish state grant at the end of June 2026 toward a €405 million cell and storage plant in Navarre. The exception proves the point: Eni Storage Systems broke ground on an LFP plant at Brindisi on 7 July 2026, one of the few large European-sponsored sites to start this year.

A gigafactory shell is a process building, not a shed

Contractors who treat this work as large-format industrial building are mispricing it. Mota-Engil's own scope description gives the game away: solvent storage, effluent treatment, a dedicated voltage reduction station, equipment installation and secondary cabling. Cell manufacturing needs dry rooms, tight humidity control, vibration-tolerant slabs, heavy electrical intake and chemical handling. The technical content sits closer to a pharmaceutical plant than a logistics box.

That matters commercially, because it puts gigafactory work in direct competition for the same scarce input as the data-centre boom: certified mechanical and electrical crews and turnkey process-fit-out capability. Contractors bidding both are bidding the same people twice.

The counterparty risk moved, it did not disappear

Northvolt taught European builders that the client's balance sheet is the real risk on a gigafactory job. Chinese sponsors answer that question convincingly and open a different one. The European Commission tabled its Industrial Accelerator Act on 4 March 2026. Alongside phased Made-in-EU content rules for traction batteries, it would place battery manufacturing on a list of emerging strategic sectors and subject investments above €100 million from countries holding more than 40% of global battery capacity to an approval regime. Those investors would need to satisfy at least four of six conditions: joint ventures with EU partners, technology transfer, research and development obligations, and workforce localisation among them.

The proposal is still moving through Parliament and Council, with definitions and enforcement timelines expected to land in delegated acts and a phased rollout from around 2027. Plants already under construction are unlikely to be unwound. But sponsors weighing a second phase, or a new site, are now doing so against rules that are being drafted while their first concrete cures.

What it means for Central Europe

Hungary is the test case that already exists. CATL at Debrecen, EVE Energy next to BMW, and the halls put up by domestic contractors such as Market Építő and KÉSZ Group. For CEE builders watching public civil-engineering volumes fall, foreign-funded industrial work has been the counterweight. It now comes with a client base concentrated in a handful of Asian sponsors whose access to the European market is being renegotiated in Brussels.

For contractors, the practical response is unglamorous: price gigafactory work as process construction, secure payment through parent guarantees and advance payment bonds rather than reputation, and stage mobilisation against phased sponsor funding. For investors and public sponsors, the harder question is whether a European battery industry built by Chinese capital counts as strategic autonomy, and what happens to half-built sites if the answer turns out to be no.