SK Innovation is set to expand its footprint in the EV battery space by joining hands with America's second largest automaker Ford Motor Company. 

The South Korean battery maker said on Thursday that the two companies signed a memorandum of understanding(MOU) for the joint venture BlueOvalSK that will build a battery factory with 60 gigawatt(GWh) hours of production by the mid-2020s.

That annual production is enough to manufacture about 600-thousand pickup trucks that require about 100 kilowatt hours(kWh) of battery power to operate. 

The joint venture is valued at six-trillion-won, or five-point-three-billion-dollar, of which both companies will invest roughly half the sum each. 

The announcement comes a day before President Moon Jae-in is set to meet U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House on Friday. The Biden administration has pushed for bold investment by industry leaders, including in the EV value chain, amid its two-trillion dollar infrastructure plan. 

SK Innovation, which is already building a two-point-six-billion-dollar battery plant in the U.S. state of Georgia to supply batteries to Ford, aims to expand its global battery production capacity to 190 GWh over the next five years.