The landscape for solar PV manufacturing in the United States is set to change radically from 2027 onwards, with the domestic sector moving from bystander-curiosity to manufacturing-scrutiny.

This article explores how this transition has come about, why the existing analysis of the manufacturing space has been largely superficial until now, and what tracking a capital expenditure (capex) heavy manufacturing sector looks like in practice.

The themes discussed form the basis of the new Solar Manufacturing USA 2026 event in Austin, Texas on 22-23 September 2026 – the first event to be staged in the United States specific to domestic PV manufacturing investment, production, and related equipment and materials supply chains.

No need to reinvent manufacturing analysis

Methodology to accurately track and analyse technology manufacturing sectors is well understood.

My education here was founded about 15-20 years ago – a time when annual solar industry deployment was measured in the gigawatts range and market analysis in the sector was broadly confined to tracking technology variants and end-market demand.

The PV industry at this time was dominated by research activities, with limited investments into ‘commercial’ mass production facilities, mainly from the early movers in Japan.

Luckily, I was surrounded at the time (2005 to 2010) by some superb market analysts that were covering the semiconductor and flat panel display sectors. The scrutiny on detail here was incredible, but the stakes were much higher given the maturity of these sectors.

In the semiconductor and flat panel industries, every capacity expansion phase, for any company at a given time, was dissected by process flow stage and tool type involved. In addition to providing phased production line ramp-up by quarter (sometimes even monthly), the focus on production tools and process flows then fed into a bottom-up analysis of capex and operating expenditure (opex) that I had never seen before.

Critically also, this type of analysis generates the addressable markets on offer to equipment and materials suppliers, in addition to companies involved in new facility builds (for example, EPC contractors or specialist gas suppliers).

The U.S. solar manufacturing space today is moving quickly to form a domestic manufacturing ecosystem. While the production equipment, coming from new capex, is still being served by tool makers from Asia and Europe, the materials demand – coming from raw materials supply for fab production – is being onshored as real hubs evolve today.

Since we launched the new Solar Manufacturing USA 2026 event – and outlined the scope of the event in terms of capex, opex and factory investments – it has been fascinating to see many domestic U.S. companies reach out to us, each looking at the new production landscape as a credible addressable market for newly created business units. Some of these questions have come from start-ups, for example pre-empting materials demand from a thriving ingot or cell production sector; others from business units within established materials companies that are household names.

For both equipment and materials suppliers, the interest speaks volumes for the prospects of the solar manufacturing sector in the United States coming to fruition over the coming years. However, market commentary until now has not offered the types of answers these companies need to build up confidence to fully commit to the sector.

Such market intel comes directly from the type of manufacturing rigor outlined earlier, by doing a bottom-up analysis of company-specific capex and technology/process-flow operations.

To illustrate how this works, I now outline a couple of examples. One for capex, one for opex and related materials demand.

Forecasting capex provides equipment supplier engagement

My first activities as a PV market analyst were heavily grounded in capex studies. Capex is the most important leading indicator in the PV industry today, with only one other metric offering even greater visibility; equipment supplier book-to-bills. Anyone that has ever tracked semiconductor capital spending will know this all too well.

Equipment supplier book-to-bill ratios can even forecast manufacturing cycles (upturns and downturns) 12-18 months out. Also, if the book-to-bill analysis is segmented further at the tool level, they can highlight technology shifts ahead of mass production metrics showing up. Nothing comes anywhere close to book-to-bill visibility in a capital-intensive manufacturing sector.

Back in the day, before China dominated PV equipment supply, a select group of ‘Western’ tool makers provided all the equipment for the solar manufacturing segment. Moreover, at this time, company reporting from these (mostly listed) entities had tool bookings and revenues centre stage in investor calls and filings.

A trip down memory lane during the 2012 to 2014 period when I routinely discussed PV equipment spending, forecasting the first PV manufacturing downturn at the time, shows how incredibly useful book-to-bill analyses of PV equipment suppliers can be. A few of the articles I wrote on pv magazine at the time confirm this: When will PV equipment spending rebound?; New solar PV capital expenditure set to rise in 2015; A cautious approach to PV technology change. The entire journey of the first PV manufacturing downturn of 2012-2014 and subsequent uptick from 2015 was clearly forecast then purely by looking at the equipment book-to-bill ratios of the leading PV equipment suppliers in the space at the time.

However, when equipment supply became a China-owned phenomenon, book-to-bill research ended. Bookings, or new order intake, is not a metric featuring on Chinese accounting standards. Regulatory requirements only force bookings to be announced if the full contract value exceeds a prior reporting year revenue threshold level or is ‘related party’ connected. Otherwise, billings – or revenues recognized – are the only useful takeaway from half-year and annual reporting; useful but mostly in hindsight for market-share allocations.

Therefore, since about 2015, capex has become the de facto metric-of-choice for any PV manufacturing research analyst looking to forecast the landscape 1-2 years out.

Let’s explain now what this looks like and why this underlying methodology is key to the U.S. PV manufacturing segment moving forward.

The build out of c-Si value-chain capacity outside China in recent years has largely revealed the leading PV equipment suppliers (all Chinese entities) of the past ten years to the outside world; companies that relaced the likes of Applied Materials, Meyer Burger, Centrotherm and GT Advanced Technologies that dominated PV equipment spending back in 2010.

The graph below shows how manufacturing capex can be correlated directly with equipment supplier market-share. In this case, I have added up the annual cell and module capex for PV manufacturing sites across Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa and the United States (the bars, scaled on the primary y-axis).

This is compared to the overseas-specific revenues for the seven of the main Chinese equipment companies that have been supplying these regions (the solid line, on the secondary y-axis); including the likes of Jinchen, Laplace, Maxwell, S.C New Energy and SC Solar. (Note that Horad is excluded from this analysis owing to its privately-held status.)

A bottom-up analysis of manufacturer-specific capex offers the ideal route to understanding equipment supplier market shares and technologies being deployed.

Capex for the above exercise was broken out to include only the PV equipment supplier allocations (removing infrastructure spending amounts). The correlation is good between manufacturer-capex and equipment-supplier-revenues, with this subset of seven Chinese PV equipment suppliers having about 40-50% share of the capex for overseas (non-China) cell and module spending over the period 2020 to 2025.

However, capex comes to life when forecasting. Effectively this provides the served addressable markets for all tool suppliers. And if capex is broken out by technology and process flow, companies offering specific stand-alone tools can then see what the size and growth looks like for their offerings. No other methodology offers this level of forward-looking visibility and it is invaluable for business development purposes.

As the United States builds out its upstream capacity volumes across cells, wafers and ingots in the coming years, PV equipment suppliers will be driven to participate in the sector only by understanding the addressable markets on offer, ultimately framed through a systematic analysis bottom-up of the new facilities coming online and the technologies and process flows chosen.

In addition to the aforementioned Chinese tool suppliers active in this space, others stand to benefit, such as Leadmicro, Autowell, TT Vision and European equipment suppliers such as Rena, Von Ardenne, Innolas, and inspection-based companies.

Materials demand reveals new domestic content push

Forecasting the demand for materials suppliers for the emerging U.S. domestic manufacturing sector comes directly from production forecasts, in contrast to the new factory-investment metrics that serve the equipment supply side.

Until now, the key raw materials (specifically module-based, including backsheets and films, solar glass and frames) have been sourced from Chinese materials suppliers’ bases in Southeast Asia.

Interestingly, the rationale for these materials suppliers to have bases in Southeast Asia (mostly in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia) was simply to have production hubs in close proximity to the China-driven customer base that originally grew cell and module capacity in these three Southeast Asia locations: not to have bases in Southeast Asia to export products half way around the world to U.S. module factories, once the co-located cell and module exporting channels had been restricted through AD/CVD policies from the United States.

However, as investments started to flow into new c-Si module fabs in the United States over the past few years, there was no clear domestic supply option.

This is illustrated clearly in the graphs below. First, showing the growth in U.S.-specific solar glass revenues from one of the industry’s dominant solar glass suppliers today – Flat Glass Group. The second graph show the uptick in PV module frames revenues from Yonz Technology, benefitting from the opportunities on offer from module production growth in India and the United States.

During the initial growth phase of PV c-Si module production in the United States, the raw materials portion of solar glass supply has been provided by a select group of Chinese glass producers that had invested in overseas bases in Southeast Asia during China’s initial move to countries such as Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia.

Chinese companies with bases producing PV module frames have benefited until now from demand coming from India and the United States. One of the leading suppliers to the United States in 2025 was Yonz Technology – meeting demand that is shifting now to domestic production of frames.

As new module materials suppliers in the United States enter the sector, the flow of supply from Southeast Asia (backsheets/films, glass and frames) will be driven out the market and there are many examples here of domestic U.S. production starting to have meaningful market-share gains.

For many of the companies seeking to grow business units for module materials supply, the main question here is market-opportunity. This came to the fore during Nextpower’s recent acquisition of Origami Solar in September 2025 to target the PV module frame supply opportunity, citing an addressable market in excess of $750 million in the United States alone. Given the expected uptick in module production from 2027 onwards, this figure may turn out somewhat conservative.

Nextpower would likely have developed this addressable market from its considerable in-house knowledge base. However, for many of the new entrants to the solar materials supply side in the United States – in particular those with new solutions – sizing the scale of the market opportunity is much harder.

As cell, wafer and ingot production is scaled next in the United States, these questions will only get more challenging in the absence of detailed bottom-up forecasting at the process flow and consumables level.

It has been heartening to see that there are so many companies looking at creating new business opportunities through supplying U.S. solar factories with raw materials and consumables in the coming years. These companies often have new ideas, not simply to plug the gap by replacing like-for-like offerings to Chinese materials producers in Southeast Asia today.

Providing a forum for this essential part of the U.S. PV manufacturing ecosystem was one of the motivations for creating the new Solar Manufacturing USA 2026 event. For the U.S. manufacturing sector to thrive, these new materials suppliers need to share in the success too, helping move technology forward working with the manufacturers and R&D personnel directly.

This is what a credible and exciting technology manufacturing sector looks like. Complete with detailed capex and opex data to support investments. And having a dedicated conference and event that acts as the annual meeting place for the entire domestic manufacturing ecosystem.

As we build up to the Solar Manufacturing USA 2026 event in Austin, Texas on 22-23 September 2026, it would be great to hear from you about how the event can help address any gaps in knowledge that you think have been missing in the sector resulting from the lack of production for ingots, wafers and cells in the past decade.

Hopefully, this article has given more insights into why this new type of event was needed in the U.S. solar sector and why 2026 is the perfect year to start this. Looking forward to seeing everyone in Austin soon.