One of the largest US battery recyclers is using old batteries from electric vehicles to power AI.
Over the past few years, Redwood Materials has become one of the top US battery recyclers, joining forces with the likes of Volkswagen, BMW, and Toyota to process old electric-vehicle batteries and recover materials that can be used to make new ones. Now it's moving into reuse as well. Redwood Energy, a new branch of the company, incorporates used EV batteries into microgrids to power energy-hungry AI data centers.
The boom in AI demand has caught electricity grids around the world off guard. The data centers powering systems that generate text, images, and videos require a lot of energy. Microgrids, or small-scale power grids, are one way to provide renewable energy to these centers without taxing existing infrastructure.
Meanwhile, electric vehicles have been gaining steam in the United States, even as subsidies for them are rolled back. But the batteries tend to last longer than the cars—they can continue working for up to 20 years, by some estimates. And even once they degrade past the point where they are useful for cars, they still have a lot of chemical life left.
Redwood Materials has worked for years on breaking down battery cells and batteries like those in phones and EVs so that the materials within can be recycled. It’s now a leader in this space in the United States. Through that process, Redwood realized that the sturdy design and high performance of EV batteries makes them a prime candidate for microgrids. In June, Redwood debuted its first such installation, a pilot microgrid using an array of 792 used EV batteries to help power a small data center in Nevada. It plans to build many more.
