Duracell has officially flipped the switch on its new Global Innovation Center for Research and Development at Science Square Labs in Atlanta, planting the battery giant's global R&D operations at 101 Nerem Street NW on the city's Westside. The $56 million facility spans 83,000 square feet inside the 13-story Science Square Labs building, with Duracell occupying four floors of the phase-one research building.
A Connecticut Exit, an Atlanta Arrival
The move, confirmed Tuesday according to finance.yahoo.com, places Duracell adjacent to Georgia Tech in Atlanta's West Midtown, where the company relocated its global innovation and R&D operations from Bethel, Connecticut. Duracell occupies 82,500 square feet of the Science Square Labs building, according to a release from partnersrealestate.com, a figure close to but not identical to the facility's reported 83,000-square-foot footprint. Employees had already begun working out of the space on August 10, 2026, well ahead of this week's formal ribbon-cutting.
Job figures tied to the project have varied depending on the announcement. Opening-day coverage from the same release described the center as expected to create 120 jobs, while an earlier Georgia Tech announcement had pegged the project at 110 high-paying jobs. Neither figure has been reconciled into a single final number.
What Duracell Will Actually Do There
Per the same account from Partners Real Estate, the Atlanta center serves as Duracell's global innovation hub for materials science, cell design, laboratory prototyping and device characterization — the kind of work that once anchored the company's East Coast operations. As Urbanize Atlanta notes, Science Square itself has become something of a jobs hub on Atlanta's Westside, with Duracell now one of its most prominent tenants.
Science Square is an 18-acre, multi-phase mixed-use innovation district built adjacent to Georgia Tech's Midtown Atlanta campus, developed by Trammell Crow Company in partnership with Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures, an affiliate of Georgia Tech. The Science Square Labs building itself is a 13-story, roughly 364,000-square-foot research tower completed in 2024, and Duracell isn't the only tenant with a stake in the address: Portal Innovations leases 33,136 square feet on the building's 10th floor, and the Georgia Department of Agriculture has leased an additional 11,000 square feet in the building, according to the same real estate report and a separate account from bisnow.com.
Why Atlanta, Why Now
The district's pull extends beyond one battery company. Georgia Tech's research awards climbed 46% from 2018 to 2024, according to gatech.edu, which also reports that Georgia Tech and Emory University are moving seven medical and biomedical research labs into Science Square. Atlanta's broader life-sciences sector has grown fast too — employment in the field rose 20 percent between 2019 and mid-2022, ranking the city 10th nationally, per sciencesquareatlanta.com, which also notes the region pulled in $708 million in NIH funding in 2022 and graduates around 2,000 students annually in biological and biomedical sciences.
At full build-out, Science Square's master plan allows for roughly 1.8 million square feet of lab and office space, 500 residences and 25,000 square feet of retail, according to the Partners Real Estate release. The first phase already includes The Grace Residences, a 280-unit multifamily development, according to trammellcrow.com. With Duracell's labs now running alongside university researchers and state agency offices in the same tower, Science Square is shaping up as one of Atlanta's more closely watched experiments in blending corporate R&D with campus-adjacent development.
