Retired EV batteries are becoming a real option for powering AI data centers in the US. Redwood Materials, the battery-recycling company founded by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, built a 12-megawatt, 63-megawatt-hour microgrid at its Sparks, Nevada campus that pairs solar generation with retired-EV-battery storage, bringing it online in June 2025. A 20-acre solar array generates the power, and hundreds of retired EV battery packs store it for use after dark. When the microgrid first came online, the data center load it served was a modest 1 MW.

That power feeds a modular data center of roughly 2,000 GPUs run by AI infrastructure company Crusoe. In a March 2026 announcement, Crusoe said the system had delivered 99.2% operational availability over its first seven months running. The same announcement noted that Crusoe Cloud itself maintains 99.9% uptime by keeping the grid available as a backup — meaning the microgrid runs alongside grid backup rather than fully off-grid. Crusoe also said it would expand the site from four to 24 modular units, which is expected to push power demand toward roughly 20 MW once complete; no completion date has been disclosed.

Why retired batteries fit

AI data center power demand is climbing faster than new substation connections or transmission upgrades can typically be delivered — a process that usually takes years. A microgrid built from retired EV batteries is one way around that queue. Because it’s a stationary installation, it never needs the instantaneous high power an EV draws, and packs or modules can be reused largely intact rather than torn down and rebuilt. Cal Lankton, Redwood Materials’ chief commercial officer, has said reused batteries let a buyer get an energy storage system “at effectively half the price” of new.

Other companies are chasing the same opening. Moment Energy, a second-life battery company headquartered in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, raised a $40 million Series B in May — announced via a press release out of Austin, Texas, where the company is building production capacity alongside its BC operations — pushing its total funding past $100 million. It named large-scale ESS deployments for AI data centers and industrial customers as one of the uses for that capital.

The same bottleneck — slow grid interconnection — is also being targeted by Seattle-based EV charging startup Electric Era, though its approach isn’t second-life at all. The CoPower platform it launched on May 21, 2026 runs on new LFP battery cells from LG Energy Solution, not retired batteries; what Electric Era actually reused is the battery-control software stack it built for its EV charging stations. CoPower is built from 2.5 MW blocks that can scale past 100 MW, operates on a power purchase agreement (PPA) model, and installs in 12 to 18 months — far faster than the five-plus years a grid upgrade typically takes. Reports diverge on the Macquarie financing — one outlet describes $50 million in project financing as secured, another as a non-binding term sheet.

Demand for retired batteries is spreading beyond data centers, too. Rivian and Redwood Materials announced on April 14, 2026 that they would deploy a retired-battery storage system at Rivian’s manufacturing plant in Normal, Illinois. Using more than 100 retired Rivian battery packs integrated through Redwood’s Pack Manager technology, the system delivers an initial 10 megawatt-hours (MWh) of storage that can dispatch power on demand, aimed at cutting peak-hour electricity costs and grid load. GM has since done something similar: in June 2026, it said it would deploy about 100 of its own retired battery packs at a Michigan plant with Redwood, building a 1.5 MW/7.2 MWh storage system. Redwood projects the installation will cut the plant’s electricity costs by more than $3 million over the system’s operational lifetime.

ARC’s take

Retired batteries are finding demand at data centers and now at automaker plants too, as the Rivian and GM cases show — a meaningful expansion for the reuse industry as a whole. But whether this transfers directly to Korea is a separate question. The data center cases are driven by working around slow grid interconnection; the automaker-plant cases are driven by cutting peak-hour electricity costs and grid load. Since the drivers differ, both are worth examining for Korea rather than assuming one is the more promising route. Korea’s demonstration and commercial deployments of retired-battery reuse are still concentrated mostly in ESS, and this trend, in practice, mostly means one more type of demand feeding into that same ESS category. For domestic players, the more relevant signal may not be data center power supply as a use case in itself, but rather the second-life ESS market’s demand base widening abroad. Whether this model becomes a reference point if Korea’s own data center power crunch intensifies is worth watching.

Source: [Latitude Media] “Crusoe and Redwood Materials are powering a data center with old EV batteries” (https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/crusoe-and-redwood-materials-are-powering-a-data-center-with-old-ev-batteries/)

Source: [Canary Media] “Redwood Materials built record grid storage project…” (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/redwood-used-batteries-data-center)

Source: [Fast Company] “Redwood Materials powers a data center with solar and used EV batteries” (https://www.fastcompany.com/91502981/redwood-materials-most-innovative-companies-2026)

Source: [Redwood Materials] “Redwood and Crusoe expand compute to 7x scale after 99.2% microgrid uptime” (https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/redwood-and-crusoe-expand-compute-to-7x-scale/)

Source: [PV Magazine] “Second-life EV batteries approved for data center microgrid expansion” (https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/03/25/second-life-ev-batteries-approved-for-data-center-microgrid-expansion/)

Source: [Latitude Media] “Electric Era is turning its EV-charging tech into a data center power play” (https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/electric-era-is-turning-its-ev-charging-tech-into-a-data-center-power-play/)

Source: [GeekWire] “EV startup Electric Era launches battery systems to tackle data center energy crunch” (https://www.geekwire.com/2026/ev-startup-electric-era-launches-battery-systems-to-tackle-data-center-energy-crunch/)

Source: [TechStartups] “Moment Energy raises $40M to turn used EV batteries into power for AI data centers” (https://techstartups.com/2026/05/05/moment-energy-raises-40m-to-turn-used-ev-batteries-into-power-for-ai-data-centers/)

Source: [PR Newswire] “Moment Energy Raises US$40M+ Series B to Build the World’s Largest Second-Life Battery Factory” (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/moment-energy-raises-us40m-series-b-to-build-the-worlds-largest-second-life-battery-factory-302762579.html)

Source: [Redwood Materials] “Rivian and Redwood Materials Announce Energy Storage Partnership for Manufacturing” (https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/rivian-and-redwood-materials-announce-energy-storage-partnership-for-manufacturing/)