Meghan McCarty Carino

The AI boom is charging up the battery business.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at an R&D lab in the heart of San Francisco's Design District, full of circuit boards, humming fridge-like devices, and I drove an EV for quite a long time.

I don't think I ever pictured what the actual battery pack looked like inside my vehicle.

It's not a high-design object, no.

That's Colin Campbell, chief technology officer at Redwood Materials, an electric vehicle battery recycling startup that recently expanded into providing grid energy storage for data centers.

It's part of the expansion of AI infrastructure we've been exploring this week.

And as we've talked about, AI companies and their massive data centers rock.

are trying to tap as much power as possible while they face pushback from communities worried about downstream effects like higher electricity bills.

And last year, Redwood successfully activated a large-scale EV battery grid in Nevada specifically to power a local data center.

We'll be right back.

You're listening to Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

We're back with my tour of Redwood Materials in San Francisco.

Larger data centers need much more than just 12 megawatts, but NVIDIA, the multi-trillion dollar chipmaker, recently invested into Redwood to help accelerate their work.

So does this business model work without this surge of demand from AI data centers?

And tomorrow, we'll wrap up our AI series with a conversation about the long view of tech booms and busts.

Maria Hollenhorst and Daniel Shin produced this episode.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech.