A recycling startup joins the AI boom
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How is the AI boom influencing the battery recycling industry?
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.
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.
What innovations is Redwood Materials introducing for AI data centers?
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.
The thing that really distinguishes the AI companies 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. It only took us four months to build.
We'll be right back.
How does Redwood Materials utilize EV batteries for energy storage?
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 this is really just engineering production here, but it's the beginnings of what will eventually be a 10 gigawatt per year manufacturing line that we will most likely site out at our facility in Nevada to be able to mass produce this thing in a way that's industrially relevant for the world.
So does this business model work without this surge of demand from AI data centers?
great question. It does work without the AI surge. The AI customers are really excited. They want power fast, and we are in a position to do that.
What role does NVIDIA play in Redwood's expansion plans?
But we can absolutely sell into all of the things that grid-scale energy storage is sold into today. And we do have those customers. They're just a little more measured, a little slower to get going.
And tomorrow, we'll wrap up our AI series with a conversation about the long view of tech booms and busts.
Can Redwood's business model thrive without AI demand?
Maria Hollenhorst and Daniel Shin produced this episode. I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
How is the AI boom influencing the battery recycling industry?
0:01–1:08
2
What innovations is Redwood Materials introducing for AI data centers?
1:08–2:09
3
How does Redwood Materials utilize EV batteries for energy storage?
2:09–3:06
4
What role does NVIDIA play in Redwood's expansion plans?
3:06–3:27
5
Can Redwood's business model thrive without AI demand?
3:27–3:40