What Became of NexWafe's EIC Accelerator Gas-Grown Solar Wafers

Almost every silicon solar wafer in the world is cut from an ingot: silicon is melted, pulled into a crystal and sawn into thin slices, and a large share of the material ends up as sawdust. NexWafe, a 2015 spin-out of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg, grows wafers directly from silicon-bearing gas instead. In the EIC Accelerator pilot's October 2020 cut-off, the European Commission selected NexWafe GmbH of Freiburg for a grant-only award for its EpiNex project; the list names no other company for the project. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,439,901.63 towards a total cost of €3,485,573.75, from 1 February 2021 to 30 November 2023.

The project's promise was specific: take the technology from TRL 5 to TRL 8, so that "the technology, processes and equipment design" would be "ready to be deployed in mass production" by the end of the project, and sell wafers directly to high-efficiency cell makers. Nearly three years after the project ended, NexWafe has a pilot line, cell results that match conventional wafers, conditional supply deals and a €26 million EU equity award letter. It does not have a commercial factory. The first line, announced in 2018 as a 250 MW plant, is now planned at 40 MW for 2028, according to the company's own site.

Where NexWafe Stands Now

NexWafe is operating. In February 2026 it signed a strategic partnership with Talon PV, which plans a 4.8 GW TOPCon cell factory in Baytown, Texas; the companies expect the deal to cover about 7 GW of wafers through 2032, according to pv magazine. Solar Power World reported that the agreement still depends on definitive long-term supply contracts, technical qualification and investment conditions, and that the first wafers would come from NexWafe's pilot-scale operations in Bitterfeld. Qualification is to start at Fraunhofer ISE in Freiburg.

On 1 June 2026 ALLEGRO started, a Horizon Europe project coordinated by Norway's Institute for Energy Technology to demonstrate epitaxial wafer manufacturing "capable of gigawatt-scale production", in which NexWafe and its Bitterfeld subsidiary receive net EU contributions of €1,366,662.50 for NexWafe GmbH and €720,083 for NexWafe Si-Fab GmbH; North Data lists the combined €2,086,746. The register shows no insolvency filing, and the 2024 annual accounts were published in February 2026.

The market NexWafe talks about has changed. Its home page now presents EpiNex as "engineered silicon wafers for space power systems", aimed at satellites in low and medium Earth orbit and high-altitude platforms, and claims a ">9% improvement in efficiency retention at EOL vs CZ" in radiation tests. A 2026 Space Power Workshop poster by NexWafe staff makes the same case for thin, radiation-resilient wafers. No independent test data or named space customer has been published. The product is still the EpiNex wafer, so this is a shift in target market rather than a change of technology. The company's news page currently lists nothing after December 2024; the STEP and Talon announcements survive in web archive copies and trade press.

The Technology: Wafers Grown, Not Sawn

Conventional monocrystalline wafers come from the Czochralski (CZ) process: a crystal is pulled from molten polysilicon, cropped into bricks and wire-sawn. NexWafe skips the melt and the saw. It prepares a reusable silicon seed wafer with a porous separation layer, grows silicon on it from the gas phase to the final thickness with precisely controlled doping, then detaches the new wafer and reuses the seed, as its website describes. The EpiNex final report claims "90% lower polysilicon material losses", "60% lower CO2 emissions and up to 50% lower costs", and a scalable route to wafers 80 µm thin, where sawing struggles.

Those figures are the company's. NexWafe's own claims have moved over time: the CORDIS objective promised 50% lower capital costs and 70% lower cost of goods, while a pv magazine report in November 2025 cited a cost saving of "up to 30%" and 70% lower manufacturing emissions. In December 2024 NexWafe reported a 24.4% efficiency for a heterojunction cell made on EpiNex wafers on a commercial M6 line, and 28.9% for a perovskite-silicon tandem cell developed with CSEM, according to its press release. PV Tech noted that the 24.4% was measured by an unnamed production-line partner and had no third-party confirmation.

What EpiNex Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The report for the second period, to 30 November 2023, lists real technical progress. The prototype pilot line in Freiburg was completed; a new electro-chemical etching system for the separation layer was installed; a second-generation inline APCVD deposition tool was built and installed; and wafers reached minority carrier lifetimes above 6 ms. "Our research partners confirmed that solar cells made on epiwafers exhibit the same efficiency as solar cells made on conventional wafers," the report says. It counts more than 40 new jobs and the strategic partnership with Reliance Industries.

The headline goal is another matter. The report says that "at the end of the project, NexWafe started construction of its first commercial factory in Bitterfeld", but no factory has started production since, and the company's December 2024 release said the design of its next-generation deposition tool, ProCon 2.5, was still due for completion by June 2025. No statement that EpiNex reached TRL 8, or that the equipment design was ready for mass production, has been published by the company or a third party. No commercial wafer sales to cell makers have been announced; the supply agreements NexWafe cites, "over 5GW" for mainstream markets in December 2024 and the Talon PV deal in 2026, are conditional.

1. Pilot line and second-generation deposition toolDeliveredPilot line completed and Gen 2.0 APCVD tool installed, per the CORDIS report.
2. Cells on par with conventional wafersDeliveredConfirmed by research partners per CORDIS; 24.4% HJT cell in December 2024, partner-measured, not independently verified.
3. TRL 8: equipment design ready for mass productionNot achievedNot announced; next-generation tool design was due only by June 2025.
4. First commercial factoryPartialGround broken in October 2023; production now planned for 2028 at 40 MW.
5. Direct wafer sales to cell producersNot achievedOnly conditional supply agreements announced.

A Factory That Keeps Getting Smaller

The Bitterfeld plant predates the EIC award. In June 2018 NexWafe announced a 250 MW factory in the Chemiepark Bitterfeld-Wolfen, to be set up in 2019, with the park's operator investing €1.5 million, according to pv magazine. At a groundbreaking ceremony on 18 October 2023, the plan was still an initial 250 MW line, at least €70 million of investment and about 90 jobs, with production in the second half of 2025 "based on completion of a contemplated Series D fundraising in the first half of 2024"; the company's Bitterfeld page said the same in April 2024.

The Series D has not been announced as closed. In January 2026 NexWafe said it was building a first plant with "an initial capacity of 50 MW" for space and terrestrial wafers, with commercial operations planned for 2027, according to its STEP Scale Up announcement; its Bitterfeld page in June 2026 gave a 50 MW line starting at the end of 2026. The current page describes a leased, existing photovoltaic production building of about 290,000 sq ft with a "40 MW planned initial capacity", a 2028 start, US production of "100+ MW/year" in 2029 to 2030 and gigawatt scale in 2032. What became of the epitaxy building whose construction began in 2023 is not explained.

The Money

NexWafe has raised substantial private money. Reliance New Energy Solar led a Series C with €25 million in October 2021, according to law firm Görg and pv magazine India, alongside a partnership to use the technology in Reliance's planned wafer plants in India; a second close brought the round to €39 million in April 2022. In June 2023 existing investors Reliance, Aramco Ventures and ATHOS and new backers Malcolm Turnbull and Keshik Capital put in €30 million for the Bitterfeld build, according to Görg and the company's release. Neither said what instrument was used; the 2023 balance sheet shows €30.3 million of convertible loans due in one to five years.

The filed accounts show the cost. Net losses were €6.19 million in 2020, €11.33 million in 2021, €8.88 million in 2022 and €15.48 million in 2023, according to extracts of the 2021, 2022 and 2023 accounts from the Unternehmensregister and Bundesanzeiger, whose filing dates match North Data. Equity fell from €42.86 million at the end of 2021 to €18.50 million at the end of 2023, while cash stood at €26.75 million. The notes to the 2023 accounts state that the going-concern assumption "basiert auf dem erfolgreichen Abschluss der Series D Finanzierungsrunde", rests on the successful close of the Series D round. The 2024 accounts are filed but not freely available, so 2024 losses and headcount could not be checked.

Why Europe Should Care

Few EIC beneficiaries sit closer to a stated EU dependency. The International Energy Agency's 2022 supply chain report warned that "China's share of global polysilicon, ingot and wafer production will soon reach almost 95%". The Net-Zero Industry Act names solar photovoltaic technologies among the net-zero technologies for which EU manufacturing should meet "at least 40% of the EU's annual deployment needs by 2030", and the European Solar PV Industry Alliance, launched in December 2022, aims to "build resilience and strategic autonomy" for the value chain. The EU has backed NexWafe through Horizon 2020, three Horizon Europe consortia (SiLEAN, EMPOWER and ALLEGRO, with net contributions of €354,010, €751,051 and €2,086,745.50 to NexWafe entities) and the STEP award. Policy support is not the bottleneck: after eight years of plans, NexWafe has yet to produce a commercial wafer in Europe, and its marketing now leads with satellites rather than the mass terrestrial market the EIC project targeted.

The Verdict

NexWafe has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.