The Silver Lining

JB Straubel had arguably the best job in the electric-car business. He left it to go pick through old batteries in the Nevada desert.

Straubel was Tesla's chief technology officer and one of its co-founders, the engineer behind much of what made the company work. In 2017 he started Redwood Materials on the side, and by 2019 he had left Tesla to run it full time. The premise sounds boring next to building cars, and that is exactly the point. The hard, unsexy bottleneck in the electric transition is not the vehicle. It is the supply chain of critical minerals underneath it, most of it refined in China. Redwood's bet is that America can mine those minerals from the batteries it already has.

The urban mine

Redwood takes in end-of-life batteries and manufacturing scrap, from phones, laptops, e-scooters, and EVs, and recovers the valuable metals inside: lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper. Then it does the part almost nobody else in North America does. It refines those metals back into the high-value components a new battery needs, anode copper foil and cathode-active material, and sells them to manufacturers. It is a loop: dead battery in, new battery materials out, without digging a new hole or shipping the work overseas. Straubel calls the country's pile of spent batteries an urban mine, and Redwood is built to work it.

The customer list says the industry takes it seriously. Redwood has supplied Panasonic with recycled anode copper foil since 2022, and it works with Tesla, Toyota, Ford, Volkswagen, Audi, Volvo, Amazon, and Lyft, among others. It is scaling cathode and anode output toward 100 gigawatt-hours a year, enough material for more than a million EVs annually.

The data center in the desert

In June 2025 Redwood launched a second business that turned heads. EV batteries retired from cars often still hold 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, too good to shred, not good enough for a vehicle. Redwood Energy repackages them into grid-scale storage. Its first deployment, on the Sparks campus with the AI infrastructure company Crusoe, paired hundreds of repurposed battery packs with solar to stand up a 12-megawatt, 63-megawatt-hour microgrid, the largest second-life battery deployment in the world, powering a modular data center full of AI chips. It has run at better than 99 percent availability, and in March 2026 the partners announced an expansion to roughly seven times the original size.

Read that again, because it is a genuinely new idea: an AI data center in Nevada, running largely on the batteries that used to be in people's cars.

The money

Redwood has raised more than $2 billion in equity over the years and is valued at about $6 billion as of early 2026, including a Series E of roughly $425 million led by Eclipse with participation from Alphabet's Google. It is also building a second materials campus, a $3.5 billion factory in South Carolina, all on private capital, which makes the pace more impressive.

Why it matters for Nevada

Redwood's headquarters is in Carson City, and its first and largest battery-materials campus sits at the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center, the same stretch of high desert as the Tesla Gigafactory. It employs hundreds of people in Nevada already, with thousands more tied to the build-out, in exactly the kind of advanced-industry jobs the region has worked to attract. More than that, it puts Nevada at the center of two of the decade's biggest stories at once: the domestic critical-minerals supply chain, and the scramble to power AI. Both are running through a campus in the desert outside Sparks.

That is the optimistic version of Nevada's next decade in one company: take the thing everyone else throws away, and turn it into the thing everyone else needs.

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Reporting drawn from Fortune, Canary Media, Crusoe, Data Center Dynamics, Contrary Research, and Wikipedia, among others. Figures are given conservatively and vary across sources: revenue was about $200 million in 2024, the company employs roughly 1,100 people overall (several hundred in Nevada), and the valuation of about $6 billion is as of early 2026. The hero image is original illustration; we will swap in licensed or company-provided photography when available.