By Jonathan Touriño Jacobo

August 27, 2026

Manufacturing, Cell Processing, Fab & Facilities, Modules

Americas

The US has a scarcity of domestically made wafer nameplate capacity. Thin-film capacity accounts for both cells and modules. Chart: PV Tech Research.

Welcome to the PV Chart of the Week produced in partnership with our colleagues at PV Tech Research. This week, we look at the forecast domestic solar PV supply chain in the US until 2027.

After exploring the imbalance between solar cells and modules earlier this month, this week’s chart highlights how wafer supply is actually the weakest link in the US.

As the chart shows, 2026 and 2027 are both forecast to see an uptick in US cell production, to some extent closing the gap that has opened up between module and cell capacity in the past couple of years.

However, the biggest problem is the scarcity of US-made wafers (just over 10GW by 2027) to supply the more than 30GW of solar cells forecast to be in production by 2027. Currently, there are only two manufacturers, Corning and Qcells, that have either operational or planned wafer capacity in 2026.

In the case of Corning, the wafer manufacturer began production in the third quarter of 2025, while Qcells started producing solar cells at its 3.3GW vertically integrated facility in Georgia in June of this year and expected to reach full production, wafers and ingots included, in Q3 2026.

A third company, Graphene & Solar Technologies’ (GSTX) subsidiary, The Quartz & Silicon Materials Company (QSM), also aims to build a 10GW silicon wafer plant in Chula Vista, California and a monocrystalline silicon ingot manufacturing plant in California’s Imperial Valley. The company expects to begin production at the wafer facility in early 2027.

In the coming weeks, our colleagues at PV Tech Research will publish a series of articles on PV Tech covering the US manufacturing landscape.

The state of the US solar supply chain will be explored in detail at our annual PV CellTech USA conference in San Francisco on 13-14 October 2026. For full agenda and booking details, click the link above.