CATL wins WEF award for AI battery design system

CATL has received the World Economic Forum’s 2026 MINDS Award for its AI-powered battery cell design platform, which the organisation described as a global benchmark for AI-driven industrial application. The platform combines physics-based electrochemical models with machine learning to accelerate lithium-ion battery development, drawing on more than 50 million data records and 600TB of test data to generate design recommendations in seconds.

The MINDS programme, led by the World Economic Forum’s Centre for AI Excellence, recognised 15 organisations globally this year across five dimensions: strategy, talent, data, technology and governance.

CATL said the platform shifts battery development from trial-and-error prototyping to predictive design, trained on more than 100,000 battery design cases and aftermarket data from electric vehicles. The company claims prediction accuracy of up to 95%.

In a statement, Ni Jun, Chief Manufacturing Officer and Co-President of Engineering Manufacturing System at CATL, said: “In complex industrial scenarios like battery production, relying solely on ‘Artificial Intelligence’ can’t solve core problems—I advocate more for ‘Augmented Intelligence’. By integrating our intelligent design system with engineers’ in-depth understanding of material properties, process principles and system engineering, we can strengthen the human–AI partnership.”

The World Economic Forum noted that CATL “turned a deep reservoir of proprietary, multimodal data into a sustained AI advantage.”

Source: CATL