Reno, Nevada — In a field outside of Reno, Nevada, sit rows and rows of solar panels soaking up sunshine.
Beside them are used electric vehicle batteries under white plastic, whose job is to keep two data centers for Crusoe, an artificial intelligence cloud platform, running day and night.
“The whole AI industry is struggling with how to access more reliable power on a fast time scale,” Cully Cavness, co-founder, president and chief operating officer of Crusoe, told CBS News.
That struggle is real. As the use of AI grows, a 2024 Department of Energy study found that U.S. data centers could swallow up to 12% of all U.S. electricity use by 2028, approximately triple today’s share.
In Texas alone, developers have filed plans for more than 100 new gas-fired plants, mostly for servers.
“Gas power is a great solution that data centers are turning to for speed, for speed to megawatts. This is an alternative way to accomplish that speed, but with a renewable power source,” said Cavness on why he believes that recycled EV batteries offer a solution that gas power does not.
The recycled batteries powering Crusoe’s two data centers come from Nevada-based Redwood Materials. The company says it recovered more than 20 gigawatt hours of lithium-ion batteries in 2024, enough to power 250,000 new electric vehicles.
On Wednesday, General Motors announced a partnership to provide EV batteries to Redwood Materials.
Engineer Colin Campbell, chief technology officer for Redwood Materials, hates to toss anything that can still work.
“There’s really very little wrong with them,” Campbell said of the used batteries. “Like, maybe they have lost 20% of their capacity. Maybe your electric vehicle’s a little bit slower. And so that’s appropriate that you don’t want it in your car anymore. But it still works great. So we just looked at that and we were like, ‘Hey, why don’t we use it to store energy for the grid?'”
The Redwood Materials engineers kept the system simple: no pipes and no pumps.
“That’s been a fun engineering effort for the engineering team to make something that is robust, that is incredibly useful, but also very cheap and quick to put in the field,” Campbell said.
The company is confident that if it works here in rural Nevada, it can clone the setup 100-fold.
JB Straubel, a former chief technology officer for Tesla who founded Redwood Materials in 2017, says the raw material is already rolling off America’s roads.
“There’s no practical limit that we see on how we can scale this,” Straubel told CBS News. “It’s one thing that makes us so excited. This is very modular.”
Straubel argues that it also sidesteps the dirtiest part of the AI boom.
“This is a different way to power the AI revolution,” Straubel said. “We’re showing, you know, that AI doesn’t have to be in conflict with the existing grid.”
