Recent comments by TOYO during its 2026 Solar Analyst Day suggested the United States does not need any more solar module capacity, yet capital expenditure is still flowing into the module segment.
During its recent 2026 Solar Analyst Day on 6 October, TOYO Co., Ltd. (TOYO) provided key updates on its U.S. manufacturing operations, coinciding with the ribbon-cutting ceremony for its module expansion in Humble, Texas.
While the presentation largely echoed the company’s first-half 2026 financial results, it offered valuable insight into management’s perspective on the broader U.S. solar landscape. Specifically, TOYO highlighted that operational U.S. module capacity has reached roughly double the projected 43 GW of domestic annual demand. As a consequence, the United States no longer requires additional module capacity.
This market assessment likely serves, in part, to explain why TOYO is bypassing further U.S. module expansions. It also contextualises why the broader Abalance/TOYO/VSUN cell production strategy has migrated so rapidly from Vietnam to Ethiopia, and ultimately directly into the United States.
While a detailed critique of the global manufacturing strategy across Abalance, VSUN, and TOYO is worth revisiting in the coming months, management’s commentary cuts directly to the heart of a much larger industry unknown: exactly how much domestic production the United States actually needs over the next decade.
For the past two decades, having a precise outlook on U.S. solar module shipments was rarely essential, serving primarily as a tool for tracking general market trends. Because the United States lacked a domestic supply base capable of accounting for the majority of its module consumption, market sizing and forecasting were largely academic exercises. Aside from First Solar, forecasting was largely a matter of calculating exactly how many gigawatts would be imported into the country, particularly from Southeast Asia.
The emergence of significant, silicon-based domestic module production since 2023 demands a new level of scrutiny regarding U.S. forecasting methodologies. While TOYO’s reliance on data suggesting a flat 43 GW of annual demand through 2031 might seem minor, investors base major capital decisions on exactly this type of narrative. Consequently, the need for a radical overhaul of how we calculate U.S. module production requirements over the next decade carries far higher stakes than ever before.
To suggest that the U.S. does not require any additional module capacity is similarly misplaced and risks sending the wrong signal to outside observers. The critical question today is not about nameplate capacity alone, but rather actual production requirements mapped against dynamic forward forecasts.
U.S. utility-scale module demand over the next decade will be aggressively driven by massive solar farm deployments designed to power skyrocketing load growth from data centres and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Consequently, future production forecasts would be far more accurate if built from a bottom-up analysis of domestic module manufacturers’ contracted pipelines—ultimately the most valid metric to use under these rapidly changing market conditions.
The figure above, taken from the new release of the Solar Manufacturing USA Quarterly report, illustrates this bottom-up pipeline analysis through the end of 2028, with projected production volumes segmented by key regional manufacturing hubs across the United States.
Moving forward, individual domestic module manufacturers will make targeted, independent judgments regarding capacity additions to satisfy their own specific project pipelines. Consequently, total U.S. solar capacity and actual production volumes will likely be determined by a bottom-up aggregation of these corporate pipelines, where a select group of 10 to 20 key suppliers effectively dictates a production-driven market trajectory.
Over the coming months, I intend to explore this pivotal issue in greater detail. Accurately forecasting this domestic trajectory is critical for mapping out forward demand across the upstream ingot, wafer, and cell production segments. Ultimately, this goes far beyond simply quantifying domestic manufacturing output—it underpins the massive amounts of capital that must be injected into the U.S. manufacturing sector over the next decade.
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