Wollongong, Australia, 18 September 2026: Hysata, the Australian company behind the world’s most efficient electrolysers, today launched HysataFab, its AI-optimised manufacturing platform, and commissioned the first production line based on the platform at its 8,500 square metre Port Kembla headquarters.
HysataFab uses artificial intelligence to produce up to 15 per cent more product from the same physical production line, through a bespoke system integrating real-time monitoring, robotics and inline quality testing.
The launch coincides with the announcement of a $49 million grant for Hysata from the Australian Government, through the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), under the Future Made in Australia Innovation Fund. Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen and Minister for Industry and Innovation and Minister for Science Tim Ayres announced the grant on site.
HysataFab is a manufacturing platform and not a single factory. Its first instance is a project worth close to $100 million at Port Kembla, housing three production lines covering electrode, membrane, and cell and stack manufacture, with an initial capacity of 50MW per annum on a single shift basis. The electrode line is open today, with the others to follow.
Hysata has raised more than $220 million from global investors to date. The grant meets around half the project cost, matched by Hysata from private capital. The ARENA grant funds the establishment and scale-up of Hysata’s electrolyser manufacturing capability. HysataFab, the AI platform that runs the line, has been developed and funded by Hysata.
Continuous operations would expand the factory to 200MW per annum of capacity, making it the largest electrolyser manufacturing facility in the southern hemisphere. HysataFab is a repeatable template, so further instances can be built towards gigawatt-scale capacity as demand grows. Because the line is AI-optimised, Hysata expects manufacturing output to increase by up to 15 per cent more than it otherwise would.
Hysata Chief Executive Officer Paul Barrett said hydrogen’s real market was industrial feedstock, not the uneconomic applications like passenger cars or home heating that drew early attention.
“The hype around hydrogen has come out of the market, and that is healthy. We never chased it,” Dr Barrett said. “Hydrogen does not need to compete with electrification. You use it where you need a molecule, not an electron. In steel, in fertiliser and in refining, there is no substitute for it.”
“The world already uses more than a hundred million tonnes of hydrogen a year, nearly all of it made from fossil fuels. The challenge is not inventing a market. It is producing clean hydrogen at a price industry can afford, and cheaper renewables are opening new markets in green steel and efuels for aviation and shipping. Green hydrogen scales when the economics work, and efficiency is most of the economics.”
“Hysata was built around a simple idea, which is to do more with less. Our electrolyser gets more hydrogen from every megawatt of electricity. HysataFab now gets more product from every manufacturing line.”
“More hydrogen per megawatt. More product per line. Both compound as we grow, and both are pointed at the same thing, which is cheaper hydrogen.”
Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen said:“This project is a major jobs and economic opportunity for the Illawarra and helps ensure Australia makes more of the clean-energy technology the world needs.
“Hysata’s electrolyser can help reduce the cost of hydrogen production and decarbonise energy-intensive sectors like steel, fertiliser and heavy transport.
“Making electrolysers here in Australia is a huge opportunity to strengthen our manufacturing capability, back local innovation, create skilled jobs and seize a bigger share of the global clean-energy technology market.”
Alison Byrnes MP, Federal Member for Cunningham said:
“Hysata is a true local success story – born from University of Wollongong research, backed by government and now delivering to customers around the globe.
“The Illawarra has the skills, capability and drive to help power Australia’s clean-energy future, and the Albanese Labor Government is backing local jobs, local innovation and a Future Made in the Illawarra.”
ARENA Chief Executive Officer Darren Miller said the grant was about turning an Australian invention into an Australian industry.
“Turning breakthrough technology into commercial-scale manufacturing is one of the hardest steps in innovation, and it is where ARENA can make the most difference.
“Hysata’s efficiency changes the cost base of green hydrogen. This grant is about building the capability to manufacture it here, at scale.”
How the line learns.
HysataFab’s electrode line is the world’s first electrolyser production line to use AI to analyse thousands of data points from every electrode it produces. Each component made helps refine the process for the next.
Hysata has spent three years building a digital record of how its technology behaves across research, testing and manufacturing. This record now holds more than 57 billion process data points. The business generates more than 100 million new data points every day, far beyond what any engineering team could interpret manually.
Shaun Maris, Hysata’s Principal AI Engineer, said real-time sensing and inline inspection create a digital record for every electrode.
“Every electrode has a digital fingerprint. We capture thousands of data points as it moves down the line, and the AI reads that in real time. It picks up drift before it turns into a defect, and closes the loop back into process control,” Mr Maris said.
“Our AI agents analyse more process history each day than the entire team could in a career, running close to 10,000 analytical queries daily. This is how HysataFab learns: every component produced helps optimise the next, continuously improving quality and yield.”
“There is plenty of noise around AI,” Dr Barrett said. “What matters is whether it changes something you can measure, and at Hysata it does. Adding capacity is the easy part. Getting more out of the capacity you already have is the harder problem, and it is the one that lowers the cost.”
Efficiency in the machine, and in the factory.
Hysata’s capillary-fed electrolyser operates at 95 per cent efficiency, or 41.5 kWh per kilogram of hydrogen. That is around 20 per cent more hydrogen per megawatt than incumbent electrolyser technologies.
Hysata’s system is also inherently cheap to scale, with fewer components and lower capital cost per megawatt of manufacturing capacity. AI extends that advantage from the machine into the factory.
From breakthrough to commercial scale.
In June 2026, Hysata signed its first binding megawatt-scale export order with a global heavy-industry leader, for delivery in the first half of 2027. Electrodes for that system will be manufactured at HysataFab.
Hysata has also completed a successful field trial with ACWA Power in Saudi Arabia and holds joint development agreements with POSCO and Vestas, and is working with tier one customers across a multi-gigawatt pipeline in hard-to-abate sectors.
Globally, installed electrolysis capacity doubled in 2025 to more than 4GW, with a further 2.5GW under construction for 2026, according to the International Energy Agency. The Hydrogen Council puts committed investment in clean hydrogen at US$130 billion across more than 570 projects, up 18 per cent in a year, with 90 per cent of that capacity under construction or already operating.
Sources: IEA, Global Hydrogen Review 2026 (June 2026); Hydrogen Council and McKinsey & Company, Global Hydrogen Compass 2026 (September 2026).