Faraday Future’s Chinese backer LeEco will build a ~$2 billion factory to produce 400,000 EVs per year

Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting is better known in the US for financing Faraday Future, a California-based electric vehicle startup, but in China, Jia is known as the founder and CEO of LeEco, an important media and technology company. While LeEco and Faraday Future have a partnership, LeEco is developing its own electric vehicle, LeSee, for the Chinese market.

We were at the unveiling of the LeSee earlier this year, you can read our full report: LeEco shows off its ‘LeSEE’ all-electric car concept [Gallery]

Now we learn that the company is going ahead with an important factory to manufacturing the vehicle in volumes.

The South China Morning Post reported this week:

“The factory, which will be built in Zhejiang province’s Deqing county, is part of LeEco’s 20 billion yuan Eco Experience Park project which will include an entertainment park. Visitors will be able to experience LeEco vehicles and its other content offerings, such as sports content platform LeSports and its music streaming service Le Music at the venue.”

LeEco has the ambitious goal for the factory to have an output of 400,000 as soon as 2018. In order to achieve that, the company reportedly plans to invest 12 billion yuan (~$1.8 billion USD).

There’s no word on when construction will start, but it would need to be soon if they hope to achieve such a production rate in less than 2 years.

To put things into perspective, the factory alone would double China’s total 2015 production of electric vehicles.

In the US, Faraday Future is reportedly working on ‘meaningful’ funding round for its EV factory. The plant is expected to cost up to $1 billion.