thyssenkrupp nucera will establish its first company-operated European electrolyser cell assembly hub in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, replacing part of the decentralised customer workshop model currently used for its alkaline water electrolysis projects. The company has leased more than 7,500 sq m at VGP Park south of Porto and plans to invest between €10m and €14m, with construction starting in winter 2026 and cell assembly scheduled from 2028.
Portuguese support of approximately €3.7m is being provided through COMPETE2030, while cells for Moeve’s Onuba project are expected to be among the first produced at the site. The change is specific to an assembly stage already required by nucera’s existing alkaline technology: individual cell components are currently assembled in workshops established around customer projects, whereas the Portuguese hub will concentrate that work inside a dedicated factory operated by nucera.
Centralisation alters both the production method and the allocation of responsibility. Standard tooling, work sequences and semi-automated operations can be maintained at one site rather than recreated for separate projects, while customers receive ready-to-install cell packages instead of organising the same assembly step locally. Nucera also says several cells will be able to move through production in parallel, increasing throughput compared with a sequential workshop approach.
The company has not disclosed annual output in cells or megawatts, so the scale of the capacity gain cannot yet be quantified against its project pipeline. Semi-automation can reduce labour content and make individual operations more repeatable, but useful factory capacity still depends on line balance, component supply, quality control and the rate at which finished cells leave the site. A faster assembly station achieves little if material arrives late or completed units accumulate waiting for another process.
Moving assembly away from customer projects removes one work package from the installation site, which should reduce the personnel, temporary infrastructure and planning needed locally. The trade-off is that Vila Nova de Gaia becomes part of the critical path for several projects at once: a disruption at the central plant could affect more than one customer, making production planning, logistics and factory reliability more important than under a distributed workshop model.
The site will also assemble service and replacement cells for the installed fleet. Electrolysis equipment continues to generate manufacturing demand after commissioning because cells and other components may require replacement over the operating life of the plant, allowing nucera to use the same production base for new projects and lifecycle support. That mix can improve utilisation when project delivery is uneven, although service work also has to be scheduled without delaying contracted new-build requirements.
Nucera’s standard alkaline platform is based around 20MW scalum units, giving the company a relatively standardised product architecture on which to build a dedicated production process. Standardisation is useful because automation works best where the same operation can be repeated with controlled variation, while project-specific installation and balance-of-plant engineering can remain outside the cell assembly line.
The Portuguese investment should also be separated from nucera’s decision earlier in 2026 to stop pursuing its own mass-production capacity for solid oxide electrolysis cell stacks. That strategic change concerned a different electrolyser technology and a different manufacturing stage; Vila Nova de Gaia instead reorganises assembly for an alkaline platform already being delivered commercially, with considerably lower disclosed capital requirements than would be associated with creating an entire stack manufacturing chain.
Utilisation will ultimately determine whether the central model produces the expected benefit. A semi-automated line needs sufficient new-project and replacement demand to justify dedicated equipment and staffing, yet nucera has not published the annual workload it expects to route through Portugal. The site therefore represents a manufacturing bet on recurring alkaline project volume rather than proof that the European hydrogen market has already reached steady industrial scale.
Construction beginning this winter will be followed by line installation and commissioning before cell assembly starts in 2028. Once production is operating, throughput, factory utilisation and delivery performance will provide a more useful test than the headline investment figure, because the reason for moving away from decentralised workshops is straightforward: nucera expects a controlled production line to assemble cells more efficiently than repeatedly rebuilding the same process around individual projects.
