Sabree Beneshour

Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino checked out one business that has benefited.

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.

Yeah, they're not that beautiful objects.

They're just kind of a little black skateboard.

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

With a bunch of red and black wires coming out of it.

But this is really the core of an electric vehicle.

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 are

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

The thing that really distinguishes the AI companies is that they really want to move fast.

And building battery storage coupled with renewables is often much faster than interconnecting to the grid or building natural gas turbines.

So we can be the first movers.

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

And so what that is is 60 megawatt hours and 12 megawatts of reused electric vehicle batteries powering a data center completely disconnected from the grid.

Larger data centers need a lot more than just 12 megawatts.

Redwood Materials just closed its latest funding round, adding $425 million to scale up production.