The AI Industry’s Fight for Reliable Electricity
Reno, Nevada – Sit in a field outside of Reno, Nevada, rows and rows of solar collectors on sunshine. Next to them are used batteries for electric vehicles under white plastic, the task of which is to run two data centers for Crusoe, a cloud platform for artificial intelligence that runs day and night.
The Growing Demand for Electricity
"The whole AI industry fights with access to more reliable electricity on a fast time scale," Cully Cavness, co-founder, President and Chief Operating Officer from Crusoe, said. This fight is real. If the use of AI grows, an energy ministry 2024 study found that the US calculation centers could swallow up to 12% of all US power consumption by 2028, which has the current proportion of about triple times.
Alternative Solutions
In Texas alone, developers have submitted plans for more than 100 new gas systems, mainly for servers. "Gas performance is a great solution that the data centers for speed, the speed of megawatts. This is an alternative way to achieve this speed, but with a renewable power source," said Cavness, why he believes that recycled EV batteries offer a solution that does not do gas power.
Recycled EV Batteries
The recycled batteries that operate the two CRUSOO data centers come from Redwood materials in Nevada. The company stated that in 2024 more than 20 gigawatt hours of lithium-ion batteries, enough to supply 250,000 new electric vehicles with electricity. General Motors announced a partnership for providing EV batteries for Redwood materials.
A New Approach to Energy Storage
Engineer Colin Campbell, Chief Technology Officer for Redwood materials, hates throwing everything that can still work. "It is really very wrong with them," said Campbell about the used batteries. "How, maybe you have lost 20% of your capacity. Maybe the electric vehicle is a little slower. And that is reasonable that you don’t want it anymore. But it still works great. So we only looked at it and said: ‘Hey, why don’t we use it to save energy for the grille?" The Redwood engineers simply kept the system: no pumps and no pumps.
Scalability and Potential
The company is confident that it can clone the setup 100 times if it works here in rural Nevada. JB Straubel, a former Chief Technology Officer from Tesla, who founded Redwood Materials in 2017, said that the raw material is already rolling off America’s streets. "There is no practical restriction that we see how we can scale this," Straubel said. "It’s a thing that makes us so excited. This is very modular." Straubel argued that it deals even the dirtiest part of the AI boom. "This is a different way of operating the AI revolution," said Straubel.
